Either claim would be wrong if it assumed perfect correlation or lack thereof. Correlations are floats not booleans. There is going to be some correlation, but there are lots and lots of factors like luck, network effects, heritable wealth, etc.

That's not the opposite; success can be correlated with fitness (i.e., success) in disparate social strata without necessitating the correctness of the strata themselves. The strata themselves can be the product of pressures unrelated to individual fitness, like our individual propensity for selfishness.

We're talking royals here, not some entrepreneur. Unless of course what you're suggesting is that royal families gain and maintain power due to intelligence.

Perhaps not, but the most successful individuals are generally not the most talented. Rather, they tend to be the luckiest. See, e.g. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...

That was certainly the position of the eugenicist monsters of the 20th century, who saw themselves as supremely rational, yet they believed that only by sterilization could they prevent the "marching morons" of the lower classes from overwhelming the elite with their sheer fecundity.

On a less controversial note, I'm thinking of lions, believed by some to be the smartest of all cats [0], yet in terms of population and habitat spread much less successful than the lowly housecat.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/super-cats-a-nature-miniseri...

Depending how you define success, absolutely.

The worst thing about pseudo-Darwinism is the fact that so few people really understand that "success" just means reproductive success. It has absolutely no moral or ethical dimension, and is partly circular.

Averagely intelligent sociopaths who are charming and pathologically unfaithful can generate a large number of kids. So - in historical times - could travelling bandits who were also rapists. That's what Darwinian success looks like.

Meanwhile someone with a PhD who dies childless is a Darwinian failure.

The problem is the usual one - evolution is stupid and selects for shallow local minima.

So the "Darwinian success" continues - until the species as a whole fails.

Yes. Being second-born is not a heritable trait.