We could attempt to argue that all groups of people have identical capabilities (IQ bell curves), and only environmental factors (lead in paint/poor early nutrition, etc) are the cause of all observed differences/life outcomes. But that would just ignore real world observations and 50+ years of failed interventions to normalize all groups in the U.S.
Also: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i... We can quibble on the accuracy of all the data, but generally we should likely take it as directionally correct.
It will be interesting to see if China maintains it lead with it's likely on going demographic collapse and how heavily the one child policy skewed abortion rates in parts of the population/pushed high degrees of educational investment.
Also likely won't matter too long now that we've begun outsourcing our thinking, battlefield decision-making, math, science and coding to LLMs. Doubt most of us will recognize what a "human" looks like in 100-200 years of genetic interventions/merging with machines/etc - should anything identifiable as a human last that long. Or some may, but they won’t be where the action is in economic/scientific terms. So no worries if noticing differences between populations conflicts with your moral belief structure. Give it time.
Anything else could be happening. But the burden of extraordinary proof for cold winters is on anybody arguing that it's a real phenomenon.
Futher: you just linked to a site based in one part on Lynn's fraudulent "IQ & The Wealth Of Nations" data sets and in another on self-reported online surveys, and then said "we could quibble on the accuracy of the data". Quibble, you say!
Why would the cold weather hypothesis be a theory that only goes back 200 hundred years as you claim? Just looked at some of the papers on the topic and it's tracking the human migration out of Africa and tracking when the first tools of various types were found and when. In more modern time the Norman invasion of France is about 1000 years ago, followed by England, not to mention the harsh conditions the Mongols were under (-40c degree winters) for about 3k years before conquering China - seems that led to a good bit of genetic spread.
Seems you're arguing that there are no differences between IQ in populations regardless of immigration patterns/conflict/harshness of the environment? If that's your claim please state it. My claim is that there are observable differences in populations of people, that are observable in the prosperity of regions and cultures, that are visible between nations and cultures, and that IQ distribution is highly likely to be root cause - or as close as we'll come to measuring the driving cause successfully. Evolutionary forces likely drove those observable differences.
It is simply an area that is taboo to research in depth because of how uncomfortable it makes folks whose morality is tied up in some form of cosmic equality/equity.
More over, I think it's imperative we study this vigorously and find truths no matter how uncomfortable that is for segments of society - particularly if we want to find interventions that work to better everyone's lot in society. Otherwise you'll spend lives and treasure to make no meaningful improvements to the conditions of people country/culture.
There aren't many Ashkenazi Jewish sprinters in the Olympics, is it so far fetched to believe that there might be more than sprinting ability differences between populations? Should these differences not be studied to better understand and improve society?
This is obviously not an area that is "taboo to research". You just don't follow the fields that research it. The website you cited in your last comment was a pretty powerful clue towards that!