I always find it slightly ironic how mother nature gets so much reverence from ostensibly communal types, despite her being the most shamelessly power hungry entity ever conceived.
Not "more intelligent", just "unusual in some way". People can be wealthier than average for all sorts of reasons unrelated to intelligence (as defined by IQ). Here's a sampling of them:
Being social and good at sales. Most successful real estate agents I've met don't strike me as particularly brilliant.
Working a boring job, living modestly, and investing in index funds for 20 years.
Winning the lottery (either literally, or by accidentally buying something cheaply that turned out to be worth a lot)
Marrying rich and divorcing.
Inheriting wealth.
Being a successful athlete or entertainer.
Being good at selling to people absolutely requires intelligence. So do many entertainment fields, and athletic achievement more than you might expect.
Investing consistently in an index fund over 20 years requires a bit of intelligence and a lot of grit.
Grit is basically conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is not correlated to intelligence. [1] This is why the stereotype of the dim but methodical plodder exists.
Sales ability is obviously a thing, since there are successful and unsuccessful people. But being able to connect with people (EQ) is crucial to be good at sales. Likeable people make more sales than unlikeable people. Being likeable is orthogonal to IQ.
I'm not denigrating successful entertainers' and athletes' cognitive abilities. They are brilliant in their fields. That's not the necessarily same thing as IQ. I'd expect the IQ distribution among that population be the same as the general population. That means some of them are high-IQ individuals in addition to being world-class singers or swimmers or actors, but most are average IQ.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...
Yeah, it flies in the face of Hollywood's jock/nerd dichotomy, but in my experience there's an awful lot of correlation between honors students and athletic participation. I think the root of it might be good genetics and early life nutrition contributing heavily to both.
So a lot of the time, it's not "being smart" that carries you to wealth, its avoiding the "disastrously stupid things" that stops you from being poor.
If we're talking about IQ, then there isn't strong evidence for this.
What the actual.... This is on HN? How low have we sunk here?
