You're contradicting yourself here, though. All of the things you describe as "mattering in life" (and though it pains me to leave a lion's eye unpoked, I won't start that argument) DO very, very strongly correlate to IQ. Look me in the eye and tell me seriously that acquired knowledge, pattern recognition, quantitative reasoning, and working memory aren't critical parts of making and keeping friends, or effective child resting, or good and ethical decision making, or good job performance, and I'll call you a liar.

You can certainly create edge cases where they matter. But for the most part, all those things are about consistency. Simple principles get them done - principles that a 70-IQ person can internalize just fine. "Keep the kid on a schedule and drive him to school." "Call your friends at least once a week." "Show up to work at 8:00, fed and rested and ready to go." That kind of thing.

It doesn't take any special intellectual skills to do that; and in fact, people with high IQs are often considerably worse at those things. They get too bored with schedules. They sleep through classes because they were up all night writing code. Their wife asks them if they and the kid ate dinner and they say "Oh, shit, I was distracted." Life is harder for them, as evidenced by the fact that high IQ is strongly positively correlated with alcoholism.

You and I may say "hush, brain, we no unga bunga today", but most people you meet are, in essence or in fact, still cavemen. This is ESPECIALLY true of low-IQ people, who often fundamentally lack the capability of rising above caveman brain.

This is one of the weirder racist arguments. Basically "I have evolved to a higher plane of consciousness than a nigger, and therefore I must behave exactly as a nigger does."

I'm no Christian, but one of my favorite Jesus quotes is "by your fruits you will know them." If two people act identically, who really gives a shit about the internal machinery? They're functionally the same person.

You can't seriously try to make the point that higher average IQs don't positively correlate to all the "things that matter" unless you're willing to argue that mudhuts and tribal warfare are just as conducive to these things that matter as highrises and indoor plumbing.

Sociological studies consistently show that the Amish are the happiest people in America. Highrises and freeways are nightmares, man. Cramming people in vertically is not a good way to work or live. Indoor plumbing is nice, but wells and outhouses are just fine, too.

Another fun fact: in colonial America, there are hundreds of reports of Europeans leaving their towns and going to live with the Natives, because it was simply a better way of life. There are almost no reports of the opposite happening.

At the time when the British Empire was most proud of its civilization, its air and water were literally poison. Hunger was endemic, people were dying of communicable disease, and life was so goddamn bleak that by the 18th century London's streets were littered with passed-out gin drinkers who would rather fucking drink themselves to death than have to live in that civilization.

Yeah, I think those high-IQ British engineers may have entirely missed the things that actually matter in life.