I do hope that you support legalizing incest between consenting adults as well. Seriously; after all, I admire consistency in regards to this.
Correct, I do, since it harms no one (key words are consenting and adults). To connect with this argument, this is something which can remain out of the hands of the Egyptian government (i.e. legal) as they establish an authoritarian society in other ways to enable growth.
They don't have to be authoritarian of course, but I think it's highly likely to happen anyway considering Egypt's position, and I'm also relying on some political science evidence which has shown that democracies in developing countries have not necessarily been better at development than authoritarian countries.
True, correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation. However, I have yet to hear an alternative explanation for this close correlation between IQ/human capital and GDP per capita.
If you don't think that cousin marriage is responsible for Egypt's likely low IQ rate (Mr. Karlin doesn't appear to have data for Egypt, but the results from countries such as Jordan and Syria aren't exactly encouraging), fine. In any case, though, based on Mr. Karlin's research, I suspect that countries which want to reach a Western standard of living should raise their IQs to Western levels. Personally, I would crack down on cousin marriage and also ensure that Egyptians had good nutrition and healthcare; now, if that's not enough, you could look at things such as having parents genetically editing their embryos for intelligence (which I certainly suspect will eventually happen in any case).
Anyway, if you have anything to add to this, please go ahead.![]()
I just don't think cousin marriage is a particular big factor in this. It sounds a bit like the race and IQ arguments. The average IQ of some nations, going by some IQ studies, is as low as the high 60s (in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Melanesia, IIRC, citing these studies). That classifies as being at the borderline of having a major intellectual disability (using the modern terminology for it). Yet these societies still function and clearly aren't run by people with mental disabilities any more than anywhere else. That right there is a major issue with the idea of IQ and economic development. And I'm fairly positive that cousin marriage's legality won't really help or hurt things.
Think of it--if cousin marriage drags down your IQ, wouldn't that imply that its practioners were low IQ to begin with, since new traits are being less introduced into the gene pool? If you had high IQ cousins and descendents repeatedly coupling, it would concentrate the genetics of that group and tend to make high IQ people (in theory). Maybe you could explain the "high IQ" cousin couples as being the elite in Egyptian society (and elsewhere) and the "low IQ" cousin couples making up the lower class and otherwise majority of the people? I think the implications of all this are a bit disturbing, definitely against common morals, and likely unscientific.
Now, raising the general IQ? Sounds good--there's really nothing wrong that can come about, and proven ways (education, nutrition, healthcare, etc.) benefit any society in many other ways.