In the modern era, the fertility-IQ correlation seems unclear; in some contexts, higher fertility seems to be linked with lower IQ, in other contexts with higher IQ. I have no idea of what it was like in the hunter-gatherer era, but it doesn’t feel like an obviously impossible notion that very high IQs might have had a negative effect on fertility in that time as well.
E.g. because the geniuses tended to get bored with repeatedly doing routine tasks and there wasn’t enough specialization to offload that to others, thus leading to the geniuses having lower status. Plus having an IQ that’s sufficiently higher than that of others can make it hard to relate to them and get along socially, and back then there wouldn’t have been any high-IQ societies like a university or lesswrong.com to find like-minded peers at.
If you have a mutation that gives you +10 IQ that doesn’t make it hard for you to relate with your fellow tribe of hunter-gatherers.
There´s a lot more inbreeding in hunter-gatherer tribes that results in mutations being distributed in the tribe than there is in modern Western society.
The key question is whether you get more IQ if you add IQ-increasing mutations from different tribes together, I don’t think that it being disadvantageous to have +30 IQ more than fellow tribe members would be a reason why IQ-increasing mutations that are additive should not exist.
In the modern era, the fertility-IQ correlation seems unclear; in some contexts, higher fertility seems to be linked with lower IQ, in other contexts with higher IQ. I have no idea of what it was like in the hunter-gatherer era, but it doesn’t feel like an obviously impossible notion that very high IQs might have had a negative effect on fertility in that time as well.
E.g. because the geniuses tended to get bored with repeatedly doing routine tasks and there wasn’t enough specialization to offload that to others, thus leading to the geniuses having lower status. Plus having an IQ that’s sufficiently higher than that of others can make it hard to relate to them and get along socially, and back then there wouldn’t have been any high-IQ societies like a university or lesswrong.com to find like-minded peers at.
or that some IQ-increasing variants affect stuff other than intelligence in ways that are disadvantageous/fitness-decreasing in some contexts
If you have a mutation that gives you +10 IQ that doesn’t make it hard for you to relate with your fellow tribe of hunter-gatherers.
There´s a lot more inbreeding in hunter-gatherer tribes that results in mutations being distributed in the tribe than there is in modern Western society.
The key question is whether you get more IQ if you add IQ-increasing mutations from different tribes together, I don’t think that it being disadvantageous to have +30 IQ more than fellow tribe members would be a reason why IQ-increasing mutations that are additive should not exist.