The author looks at "observables" of performance without considering whether there might be confounders such as those discussed in great nuance here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joes.12328 .

He cites similar work by William Shockley who taught both electrical engineering and scientific racism at Stanford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley (no swipe at the author, just pointing at the biased motiviations of some of the researchers foundational to the idea of "high performers").

In general, when you see pareto structures or power laws, you should think of compound or cascade effects, which in human structures generally means some form of social mediation. Affinity for a desireable skill might be gaussian, but the selection process means that the people who _get_ to do that skill might become pareto shaped because if you aren't much better than the next guy, you wouldn't stably stay at the top. Similar logic can hold for other expressions.

In general, I wish more people would read https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Causality-by-Judea... or at least the more accessible https://mixtape.scunning.com/ before starting to conjecture from data about social systems - the math will tell you what you can and cannot speculate on.

(fun exercise: draw the causal models of IQ in https://dagitty.net/ and ponder the results)