Thilo Sarrazin: are Muslims really lowering the intelligence of German society?
Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany Abolishes Itself: How we are putting our country at risk]
By Thilo Sarrazin (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, €22.99)
Thilo Sarrazin, a minor German politician on the technocratic wing of the country’s Social Democratic party, has just written what is probably the bestselling political book in postwar Europe (1m copies in hardback and counting). Everyone in Germany knows at least a simplified version of what Germany Abolishes Itself says, and the reaction to the book is helping to drive government policy on minority integration.
The message of the book, in headline form, is that Germany is becoming smaller (thanks to the familiar story of a falling birthrate among native Germans) and stupider (thanks to the fact that educated Germans are having fewer children and the fastest growing part of the population are poorly-integrated Muslim immigrants). That “stupider” is, of course, contested and has led to accusations of a flirtation with eugenics—of which more later.
But Sarrazin is no right-wing populist in the image of Jörg Haider, the late Austrian politician, or even Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamic leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Much of the book is a dry compendium of economic and social data. Indeed, I suspect his book is the political equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—much purchased but little read. Although controversy has swirled around his comments on group intelligence and the failure of German immigration policy, there is little in German public policy that he does not also take his axe to: welfare policy, education and training policy (apparently Britain now has a much higher proportion of students studying maths, science and technology than Germany), the poverty lobby and more. In fact, it is a meticulously prepared trashing of the liberal pieties of the 1968 generation.
The political and media class’s initial instinct was to denounce the book, and Sarrazin was forced out of his job at the Bundesbank. But as sales started to take off and as the new social media—the bloggers and emailers—lined up overwhelmingly behind Sarrazin, the reaction of political Germany shifted, albeit grudgingly. Chancellor Angela Merkel opportunistically declared the happy-clappy multikulti of the German left to have “failed utterly.” There was even a respectful and self-critical essay in Der Spiegel magazine by a leading liberal, Peter Schneider.
This shift is rather remarkable and it may help to prevent the rise of a serious right-wing force equivalent to France’s National Front. As the book complains, German public debate has, for obvious historical reasons, been more constrained by various kinds of taboos about national culture than any other big European country. As recently as 2000 a leading Christian Democrat politician, Friedrich Merz, had his political career damaged by merely asking that minorities show respect for the law and institutions of the dominant culture (Leitkultur). In the ensuing row the then-president of Germany, Johannes Rau, declared that he was not proud to be German.
Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.
Another difference that struck me was the invisibility of the Turks and the other big minorities living in Germany, compared with the relative visibility of Britain’s minorities. I later worked out why this was. There was what Peter Schneider calls an “unholy alliance” between left and right to pretend that Germany did not have an integration issue—especially amongst its Turkish, middle eastern and north African minorities. By 1990, there were more than 2m Turks living in Germany, many of them second and third generation. Yet the Christian Democratic right still refused to accept that some of the “guest workers” who had arrived in the 1950s and 1960s had come to stay—and rejected the idea that Germany was an “immigration country.” This meant that they put no effort or money into turning Turks into Germans. As for the anti-national left, the idea that the exotic Turks should be forced to learn the language of the SS was equally abhorrent. So the mainly Muslim minorities were left alone in their parallel worlds.
Things have got a lot better in the last 20 years. In 1999, the then Social Democrat government made it easier to become a German citizen and about 30 per cent of Turks now have full citizenship. Turks and other “New Germans” are more visible in political and public life. The flag waving at the 2006 World Cup in Germany seemed to herald a national “normalisation” and the multicoloured football team at the 2010 World Cup revealed a fully multi-racial land (although they continued to play German, not multicultural, football).
As Sarrazin himself describes, there have also been many successes of integration—not just the so-called Aussielder, people of German descent who lived, often for many generations, in eastern Europe or parts of the former Soviet Union. Also some “visible” minorities, such as Indians and Vietnamese, do well in the education system and the job market, as do many of the asylum seekers who stayed after the big inflow of the early 1990s.
But Sarrazin is more interested in the failure of the Muslim background Turks and north Africans—about half of Germany’s ethnic minority population (which altogether is now about 15 per cent of the total). And he describes the failure in shocking and pitiless detail. The poor German spoken by third-generation immigrants, the abysmal performance in school (72 per cent of Turks living in Germany, aged 20 to 64, have no qualifications at all), the high crime rates, the fact that they take far more out of the welfare state than they put in (only 33 per cent of Muslim Germans live mainly from their labours). According to Christopher Caldwell—who is wrongly described by Sarrazin as British and liberal; in fact, he is American and conservative—the number of foreign-born residents rose from 3m to 8m between 1971 and 2000, but the number of employed foreigners stayed the same at 2m.
There are plenty of explanations for this failure. The fact, for example, that Muslims tend to come from poor, traditional societies and, thanks to the failure of integration, have reproduced those societies in Berlin, Duisburg and other German cities. And Islam itself may contribute to a greater cultural distance than is the case with some other minorities.
The fact that Muslim migrants perform poorly in the context of German society does not, however, support the outlandish claim that they are inherently stupider than Germans or other minorities. Sarrazin does not quite say this but he does assert that their poor performance is dragging down the country’s average ability level—something that could probably be said of most of Europe’s immigrant groups from poor countries, at least for a generation or two. But Sarrazin digs deeper into the intelligence story. He is fascinated by group IQ levels and includes a long discourse on the above-average IQ results for modern Jews—a product, he argues, of the ancient selection pressures on a persecuted minority which resulted in larger families for those who performed well in the trade, finance and intellectual pursuits that Jews were restricted to. Given that intelligence is at least 50 per cent inherited, Sarrazin claims that over many generations a cultural trait can thus become biologically “fixed” in a population.
It is an intriguing argument, but given the vast timescales over which evolutionary pressures usually operate, the complexities of genetics, and the slipperiness of the concept of intelligence, this kind of argument is at best highly speculative. Sarrazin does not provide evidence of low average IQs for Germany’s Muslims—and he is perfectly aware of how environmental factors affect IQ (he cites the famous Flynn effect, which has seen average IQ levels rise by a couple of points a decade in rich societies). Sarrazin is not a racist—and he happily talks about different historic ability levels in different regions of Germany—but he is an “intelligence determinist” and is surely wrong to link current performance outcomes in German society, and indeed the whole system of social stratification, so directly with underlying intelligence levels. There are simply too many other factors getting in the way, and ability can be acquired as well as inherited. As an interviewer in Die Zeit newspaper said to him: “My father was a gardener, I am an academic. It’s not because I am cleverer than him but because I had more educational opportunities.” Turks’ educational and career outcomes would have been vastly better if they had had the money and German-language classes lavished upon them that the Aussiedler have enjoyed—or indeed the educational resources enjoyed by underperforming Finns which Sarrazin praises.
It is a shame that an otherwise powerful and overdue argument about integration should be too easily reducible to a racist slogan: “The Turks are making us stupid.” Germany’s dismal failure to integrate something like 7 per cent of its population is clear enough without requiring a detour into intelligence theory. And the message from this book is hardly going to inspire Turks to become better citizens of Germany: already 58 per cent feel they are not welcome in the country.
Sarrazin’s policy solutions are relatively mainstream, echoing some of the new Labour reforms in Britain: tighter control of immigration and language tests for newcomers; steps towards compulsory citizenship for long-term residents; a sharp focus on teaching German at immigrant-dominated schools. Sarrazin is also concerned at how the welfare system creates alienation, saps initiative and prevents the workplace integration that countries like America are famous for, and so he recommends probationary periods before immigrants are entitled to benefit. The government is already acting on some of these points.
Ultimately, Sarrazin’s hard-headedness is a welcome counterpoint to the wishful thinking of the 1968 generation. The former finance minister of Berlin, who looks like a soldier in the Kaiser’s army, is a member of the awkward squad. You can imagine him causing minor riots at liberal Berlin dinner parties. Most of his argument is clear-eyed and well-informed, but he could not resist the provocations both on intelligence and on the nature of the underclass, which he never bothers to define. Yet the fact that his book has been so influential, despite the provocations, marks an important step forward for Germany—not only in facing up to the failures of its past immigration policies, but also in bridging the wide gap between popular opinion and the political class and thus preventing a German Haider.
David Goodhart is Prospect’s outgoing editor
jim evans
Could you at least summon up the strength to explain where Germany has gone wrong?How would they integrate people they didn`t want in the first place?
The real tragedy is that we have allowed American casino capitalists to run Europe by mobilising mass immigration and our sense of collective guilt about the World Wars.
I don`t recall ever being asked whether I wanted to be forced to compete for housing and jobs and public services with millions of cultural strangers from across the world…..and I am left wondering if we learned anything from the failure of enforced multicultural experiments of the past.
Soros
RE: the commment: “At what point do we start thinking that this consistent world-wide pattern might tell us more about the culture of muslim immigrants than it does about the culture of their hosts?”
Islam as a culture devalues learning that comes from outside of its own traditions to the point that Science and Biology, to mention just two fields, are barely taught or taught poorly in many Muslim countries. Stressed still, is knowledge of the Koran and the Hadiths, memorization rather than creative, critical thought.
Education tends to be moral education, intended to place the individual into the hierarchy of society rather than train him for a career in the modern world. Until this changes drastically, expect academic under-performance, especially from poor Muslims immigrating to the West.
As for Jews, the culture values education highly, most likely because a good career brings greater safety when times get tough. If this has had genetic benefits over time, good for the Jews.
Dr. Marc Latham
I think the IQ inclusion was stupid, as it meant Sarrazin opened himself up to accusations of racism, instead of focusing on the real point: that groups of immigrants (mostly Muslim) want to overthrow their host countries, and that a lot of people in the top positions of our countries only care about themselves, and nothing about the country or its people.
I only know the situation in Britain, but it seems similar to the German example, and supports the concise and coherent case presented by Jim Evans in earlier comments.
During the New Labour years, multiculturalism was used as a mantra to suppress any argument against immigration. I’m happy to live in a multicultural country, but it seems more than that to me: it’s about multiculturalism eradicating all semblance of Britishness, with colonial Britain punished for its sins.
Anybody who questioned it was called a racist, and native British people who lost their jobs due to cheaper foreign labour were told it was economically imperative, as otherwise industry could not compete.
Andrew Neather later admitted New Labour did it to for social engineering and to rub the right’s noses in it (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1222613/Labour-let-migrants-engineer-multicultural-UK.html)
but the main victims were Labour’s traditional supporters: the British working classes.
And then the economy collapsed, and it was all shown to be a spin illusion, but Blair doesn’t care, as he set himself him to profit from his position as our beloved leader, and is now off making money around the world.
Many of the upper classes who profited from cheap foreign labour still have their high paying positions, or they have retired overseas after selling up to foreign owners.
On the streets, multicultural facism, which portrayed the native British as stupid and lazy, and the foreigner as smart and resourceful, provided a fertile ground for mostly Asian paedophiles to groom mostly white children, as seen in the recent case from Derby, which is said to be happening across the country: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8157739/Asian-gang-prowled-streets-searching-for-rape-victims.html
The upper classes seemed willing to sacrifice underclass children (with the derogatory term chav being used to demonise them) for the greater multicultural good: Brand UK.
And New Labour threw money instead of common sense facts and international realities at Muslims, building up their image of victimhood and right to conquer the world, instead of getting them to face up to how their fellow Muslims have been responsible for war, murder, slavery, colonisation, atrocities, misogony, homophobia, racism, inequalities and prejudice around the world.
I wrote an article about the British liberal love for Islam, and hatred for Britain, the USA and most of all the Jews, for Suite 101 recently:
http://www.suite101.com/content/is-the-british-stop-the-war-coalition-racist-and-xenophobic-a311229
jim evans
I am happy to live in a multiracial country but view multiculturalism as an alien American concept created to make sense of the cultural/racial diversity found in the USA.
I dearly wish that the population of the world was much smaller so that people could move about and find the sort of environment best suited to their needs without creating a feeling of threat among what we call “host populations”…when in fact we “hosts” have no say in whether our “guests” arrive here and demand our scarce resources in “democratic tolerant multicultural Britain”. Ho ho!
jim evans
Marc…why don`t we modern scientific secular westerners stop tolerating and pandering to prehistoric religious irrational alien so called cultures here in the West …but ALSO… at long last… STOP MEDDLING in THEIR traditional parts of the world?
Why are we constantly interfering in the East?
I feel sorry for all the victims of the London Bombings… including the bombers and their families.Why do we keep importing foreigners and dumping them in areas where their welcome is far from enthusiastic….their housing is poor…and their job prospects are no better than those of the indigenous British underclass?
Dr. Marc Latham
I know Jim, I agree. In the last fifteen years in Britain it’s as if God has shown itself again, but it hasn’t, there’s just a new wave of religious fundamentalism, and it’s creating the same kind of division and conflict as previous ones.
I’m a vegetarian and consider myself more of a Buddhist than any of the other big religions, so for me it’d be cool if we mostly had nice peaceful yoga enthusiasts and vegetarian/environmental progress, but most of what we hear in the media is Muslims trying to get us to eat halal with its regressive slaughter policy, repeating the same kind of monotheistic propaganda that everybody has already heard before with Christianity, or threatening violence.
I supported removing the Taliban before 9/11, because of their inhuman policies, but with the corruption in government I’m wondering if it’ll be worth anything even if we do keep the Taliban out. I hope it is worth something, and not for any imperialist reasons, but for the Afghan people, and those who’ve given their lives trying to improve the situation.
Peter
Sorry Soros but a muslim failure to integrate is not a worldwide pattern. here in canada the vast majority of muslims immigrants have integrated into our society quite well.
Germany’s experience is instructive. If you bar citizenship to immigrants, to their children and even to their grandchildren the message is “we don’t actually want you to integrate”.
Every group of immigrants faces similar arguments from some people – they are stealing “our” jobs, competing for housing etc. If the jobs regularly go unfilled they’re not yours, you obviously don’t want them.
jim evans
There are no jobs Peter…it`s nonsense…we could halve our population and live to a much higher standard of living without all that “extra labour” which in truth is often doing tasks no one wants done or servicing the immigrant community that we don`t really need anyway.
It`s more “growth” nonsense…growing an economy when we don`t need it and overpopulating our territory with people who exhaust resources like and housing water….and pollute our environment with their “industry” and domestic waste.
Let`s get real!The Christians and Muslims simply procreate with one thing in mind…getting rid of the non believers and taking over your land in the name of their faith …so they can raise more generations of brainwashed followers who flood out of their original territory and take over the land of those who live peaceably within their own borders.
If you try to engage them in sensible talk about population control they tell you “God will provide” for all those new Haitians or Rwandans or residents of Calcutta or Manilla or wherever else their irresponsible “faiths” take hold.
We can`t go on like this….and we can`t let brainwashed dreamers decide our grandchildren`s future either….whether that`s the Pope or Soros or Osama Bin Laden or anyone else who refuses to take a sensible rational approach to the fact that in my lifetime the population of the world has got three times larger!
What will happen when London is like Haiti? will the immigrants stop coming?Perhaps…..if Britain has turned into a hell-hole and all decent infrastructure and public services have disappeared under the pressure of impossible levels of demand…and Britain is like the USA ..or Rwanda.
Hi There
Or Oklahoma.
Mark Breza
Hey Jim Evans they didn’t want your colonialism
when U came to their countries.
How could U expect them never to come to your country.
U dont live in a vacuum !!
jim evans
Gosh! There`s a lot more interest in this subject (immigration and cultural cleansing)than anything else on this website! What a surprise!
Could it have anything to do with the total absence of any rational debate about it between the electable political parties….or is it even more deep-seated than that?
Possibly the sense among ordinary europeans that they are sharing the fate of many of their ancestral relatives and being driven from Europe by the money men …..who want to replace the indigenous “idle and feckless chavs” with hungrier less demanding slaves of the sort they have in China and India?
It`s happened in the British Isles many times before
jim evans
Mark in Breza…I have never been to Bosnia and demanded to live at the expense of (or in competition with) the Bosnian people…so I can`t see what you are complaining about.And its a long time since we had an empire Mark.
If you want to complain about empires have a talk with Russians or the German-run EU.
Hi There
Well, I’ve never been to Spain. Or to Albuquerque. However, I did pump gas in London — London, Ohio.
I declare this discussion…over.
Chuck
“but he is an “intelligence determinist” and is surely wrong to link current performance outcomes in German society, and indeed the whole system of social stratification, so directly with underlying intelligence levels.”
Mr. Goodhart surely in not a psychometrician; where he, he surely would know that one can link many performance differences and much social stratification to underlying differences in general intelligence. And Flynn surely would agree. Whether the problem with the Turks is linked to differences in general intelligence is something that can easily be investigated — the research I have seen suggests that it is — This, of course, is an issue separate from that of the etiology of these differences, something which is rather difficult to investigate.
Frank Ellis
David Goodhart’s review of this all important book in Prospect Magazine fails to do justice to Sarrazin’s achievement. The obvious comparison is not, as Goodhart would have us believe with Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, it is with Charles Murray’s and Richard J. Herrnstein’s, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). It is also quite clear that Sarrazin has carefully studied the work of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, specifically, Richard Lynn’s Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations (1996); Eugenics: A Reassessment (2001); Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis (2006); and The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide (2008); and the two studies which Lynn co-authored with Tatu Vanhanen: IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002); and IQ and Global Inequality (2006). It is, among other things, Sarrazin’s mastery of the secondary literature that makes Deutschland schafft sich ab so effective in demolishing the cult of multiculturalism.
The way Sarrazin was treated by Germany’s equivalent of the Guardian-reading classes underlines yet again the totalitarian impulses of those, who, without any mandate, want to impose multiculturalism on the indigenous populations of Europe. Angela Merkel’s public acknowledgement that multiculturalism has failed merely confirms what has been obvious for the last forty years all over Western Europe. Why has it taken so long for Europe’s politicians to face up to the truth? And why indeed do they hate the truth?
Goodhart claims that: ‘Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany’. This is a ridiculous claim. The gap is just as wide in Britain and not just between published opinion and public opinion. In Britain, as in Germany, politically correct activists in the broadcast media endlessly lie about the real costs and damage inflicted by multiculturalism. On issues of race, the scale and nature of black crime, multiculturalism and legal/illegal immigration the BBC and universities simply cannot be trusted. There is nothing liberal about liberalism either in Germany or in Britain. Given Germany’s National-Socialist past, the Germans have something of an excuse for the zeal with which they have pushed the United Nations ideology of multiculturalism. But for how much longer are Germans going to torment themselves about 1933-1945 and to tolerate being harassed and bullied by xenophile fanatics? Nie wieder and ich bin Deutscher und bin stolz darauf can happily coexist. It is high time that Germany’s nation-hating left woke up to this fact.
Goodhart is wrong to suggest that indigenous Germans are in any way to blame for the failure of Turks and other immigrants to integrate. Sarrazin makes it quite clear that the reason masses of immigrants from Third World slums and failing states are attracted to Germany has nothing to do with Germany’s cultural and intellectual achievements and everything to do with the fantastic levels of welfare provision available in Germany and a standard of living that would be impossible in their own countries. Without the welfare handouts these immigrants would not have come to Germany and they would not have stayed. They would have found another host.
‘The intelligence story’, to use Goodhart’s words, offers by far the most convincing explanation for the failure of Muslims to meet German standards in Germany. In the case of Britain, it explains a whole range of undesirable outcomes associated with the underclass (immigrant Muslims and blacks and indigenous whites), as demonstrated in The Bell Curve. On a global scale the low mean IQ of Sub-Saharan Africa – circa 70 – explains why so much of Africa exists in a wretched and savage condition. That Muslims tend to come from ‘poor, traditional societies’ is part of the problem, but Goodhart explains nothing by telling us this. Why are these societies poor and backward? Why is Sub-Saharan Africa poor and backward, despite its vast mineral wealth? What do unskilled Turkish and African immigrants bring to an advanced First World economy such as Germany? Germany’s left will claim that indigenous Germans are being enriched by the diversity. So what is it like for an indigenous German to go through parts of Berlin and other German cities experiencing all this life-enhancing diversity? Does he feel enriched? Sarrazin suggests otherwise: ‘A German going through these districts would feel like a foreigner in his own country’ (Deutschland schafft sich ab, p.300). I know the feeling Herr Sarrazin. Even if the Christian Democratic right refused to accept that Turkish guest workers would not go back to Turkey, as Goodhart claims, they bear no responsibility for the failure of Turks to adapt to Germany. That failure falls squarely on the Turks themselves and the nation-hating agenda of Germany’s middle-class left. Of them Goodhart notes: ‘As for the anti-national left, the idea that the exotic Turks should be forced to learn the language of the SS was equally abhorrent’. I wonder whether Germany’s home-grown nation haters would object to German immigrants in Russia being expected to learn the language of the NKVD.
Sarrazin’s arguments on IQ and the consequences of Germany’s mean IQ being lowered – a demonstrable dysgenic effect – are not provocative. They are well founded. Sarrazin offers data and explanations which the left in all Western states are too frightened to contemplate because leftists despite all the public propaganda know that all men are not created equal; that some people are more intelligent than others and that this has real-world consequences which cannot be explained by racism and other ad hoc explanations. In chapter 7 (Immigration and Integration: Expect More, Offer Less) Sarrazin, contrary to Goodhart’s assertion, does provide a comprehensive definition of the underclass in its Muslim variant and one that would be instantly recognizable in Britain. Its main features are as follows: (i). below average integration in the employment market; (ii). above average dependence on welfare and handouts; (iii).above average fertility; (iv). spatial segregation with a tendency to create parallel societies; (v). above average religious adherence with an attraction to fundamentalist Islam; (vi).above average criminality (street crime) and participation in terrorism (Deutschland schafft sich ab, p.264). Strip out the Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism and we have most of the features of the immigrant black underclass as well.
Germany is very fortunate that it has produced a man of Herr Sarrazin’s calibre. His moral courage and intellectual ability are obvious. In Britain we have no politician of comparable ability and honesty who will tell the truth about multiculturalism and its dire consequences. On these issues our own political class is cowardly and mendacious. In writing this book Sarrazin has rendered his fellow Germans a great service: and not just his fellow Germans. Deutschland schafft sich ab is also an absolute must read for all the white, indigenous populations of Europe who are being racially, culturally and physically dispossessed in their ancient homelands, who are, in other words, being consigned to oblivion.
jim evans
Frank Ellis…it`s a joy to read some common sense on this issue…..thank you.
However,I think it is now abundantly clear that the USA provides the template for our brave new global capitalist world …and the powerful use their influence to promote:
1)The sort of virtual one party capitalist/globalist ersatz “democratic” governments we have in America and Britain.
2)Mass immigration and multiculturalism of a sort that gives capitalists free reign to undermine and disempower indigenous organised labour.
3)A globalist “mediaocracy” (or New Inquisition) that uses the power of the media to promote ideas like free markets deregulation open borders multiculturalism miscellaneous “faiths” (or religious delusions) and regime change….while they actively persecute nationalists (unless they are Irish or Israeli or other favoured groups) non-believers socialists,etc.
Their power is so great that we can think and say what ever we like (however scientically valid) and it won`t make any significant difference to the spread of multiracialism and mass immigration.
Politics and economics are not a democratic rational process where we sit about in a permanent global brains trust thinking up the ideal future and then implementing it in a deliberate thoughtful way.
The powerful write the future in ways they want it to happen….genetics and IQ and “social science” are their tools… not the arbiter of what they do….or (sadly)of the knowledge we are allowed to have via the media and politics.
Hi There
I thought I told you guys to shut up.
Tuc Brinton
The real questions are:
1 Is Thilo Sarrazin lowering the intelligence of German society?
2 Is there something wrong with the German educating system that it can produce such buffoons as Sarrazin?
3 If he so lacking in intelligence that he can only make a living by pandering to people even more intellectually-challened than himself?
4 Where does he plan to site the first Concentration Camp for Muslims?
C. Nutrio
You say that given the vast timescales over which evolutionary pressures usually operate, the complexities of genetics, and the slipperiness of the concept of intelligence, this kind of argument is at best highly speculative. Those three reasons are the usual fallacies of those who deny the biological differences in intelligence. First, many recent works in genetics show that humankind is evolving much faster than previously thought. Second, something can be complex but at the same time, be determined by a rich network of genes. That happens with height, for instance. Concerning the concept of intelligence, it is not slippery at all, since it has been correlated succesfully with g, with income, with beauty, with health, with myopia… with so many things… those correlations would be higly improbable if it was just nonsense. Last but not least, remember that ashkenazi jews are just 0.2% of global population, but they have got about 30% of Nobel prizes… is that sliperry too?