That's fair. I think I actually remember reading somewhere that worldwide height is catching up with European height, and what was posited to be genetic differences was actually due to nutrition. Don't have a source at hand, though.
> It sounds like you are someone who doesn’t believe intelligence can be measured.
I'm certainly skeptical about the utility of IQ or any other test as a general measure of "intelligence", when what intelligence even means is an active matter of debate.
> I'm certainly skeptical about the utility of IQ or any other test as a general measure of "intelligence", when what intelligence even means is an active matter of debate.
That's partly because it's mythologized to hell and back, and people often turn to the lack of a definition given concisely in words as proof that we don't really know it.
But, g exists, we know its nature rather well, and being able to do hang on to that measure has enabled considerable detective work as to the physical underpinnings of it.
Most simply, I think treating it as a brain performance benchmark, just like you would for a computer, doesn't go very far wrong. It's variation in the general monkey brain blueprint we're all built from, and has physical correlates that imply it as a rather general measure of the brain's performance (it's eg. linked to faster average reaction times, which would make no sense for a measure of book-learning aptitude). So, more IQ = monkey with more CPU cycles and RAM, done. Zero mythology, zero romanticism, simple.
As one analogy, you could liken it to gravity: For the longest time we knew things fell down, we could measure that speed, etc. but we didn't know why things fell down. Then we made some theories, and then new ones, and then new ones. But we don't actually know the cause and the mechanism completely. We know mechanisms of how it acts and measures of how strongly, but stuff like a quantum mechanical theory of gravity is anyone's guess at this point.
All along that journey of discovery, we still knew a fundamental fact: Somehow things fell down. That observation is the anchor. In intelligence research, that observation is g.
> It sounds like you are someone who doesn’t believe intelligence can be measured.
I'm certainly skeptical about the utility of IQ or any other test as a general measure of "intelligence", when what intelligence even means is an active matter of debate.