> Nobelists are certainly bright, but it seems more likely you'd find the most intelligent people amongst still-extant stone age tribes, whose pre-industrial life-style would still subject them to selective pressures long released in the more-developed world.
This conclusion is only justifiable if (1) the population of "stone age tribes" and the part of the world where those selective pressures have been released (because people are indivisible units beyond a certain point), and (2) if intelligence was fully determined by genetics rather than merely having some heritable component.
If there are important environmental factors in intelligence to which modern technology can positively contributed, and there are a lot more people living with modern technology, then its quite possible that the mean, median, and max realized intelligence would be higher in the modern part of the world than in "stone age tribes", even if the latter have more genetic benefit from pro-intelligence selective pressure and thus a higher mean/median genetic intelligence capacity.
This conclusion is only justifiable if (1) the population of "stone age tribes" and the part of the world where those selective pressures have been released (because people are indivisible units beyond a certain point), and (2) if intelligence was fully determined by genetics rather than merely having some heritable component.
If there are important environmental factors in intelligence to which modern technology can positively contributed, and there are a lot more people living with modern technology, then its quite possible that the mean, median, and max realized intelligence would be higher in the modern part of the world than in "stone age tribes", even if the latter have more genetic benefit from pro-intelligence selective pressure and thus a higher mean/median genetic intelligence capacity.