Let’s say I have a set of newborn white rats and another of gray rats.

The gray rats get nutritious meals at periodic intervals, have access to their rat mamas, and are allowed to roam free in a large, comfortable and safe environment. As they grow, I give them intellectual challenges in exchange for food, incentivize them to exercise and continue giving them all nutrients they need. The white rats, however, are kept isolated in small cages and are fed every two days with the scraps of the gray rats. I don’t give them intellectual challenges or the opportunity to properly exercise.

After a couple of years, I administer a test on them. The test is very similar to the intellectual challenges I was giving before to the gray rats.

To my surprise, the gray rats do a lot better than the white rats.

Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.

——

This is obviously an exaggeration, but I hope it helps people understand how similar things can and do happen in the real world with real humans.

It’s the environment they are raised in, their relationships, the incentives, the adult examples they encounter, their access to good and empathetic education, role models they can relate to and aspire towards.

Those, I assure you, are much better indicators of intelligence and education than their physical appearance or genetics.

> Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.

Well, they did, didn't they?

The wrong conclusion would be "This is the limit of what white rats can do", which is not how I interpreted GP's comment.

TBH, this is not an easily solved problem: some cultures are better at producing superior students and productive people than other cultures. Those superior individuals are not superior due to inherent traits, but due to environment (culture).

How on earth do you change those under-performing cultures? Any attempt to do so will be met with cries of racism or similar.

[As an aside, my general observation with the the GP's list of IQ is that those cultures who prioritize sport less do better. While GP showed a correlation between race-groups and IQ, I observe the same correlation, but inverse, between sports-focused-cultures and IQ. Removing pro-sports-tracks programs from schools is probably going to do wonders for the bottom 10% of performers in a school]