Upvoted because you don't deserve to be downvoted for this post. It shouldn't be light gray. I'm taking an agnostic viewpoint on whether the qualities we want

Upvoted because you don't deserve to be downvoted for this post. It shouldn't be light gray. I'm taking an agnostic viewpoint on whether the qualities we want are genetic or cultural and educational, an whether IQ is a valid measure of intelligence. I generally agree with most of what you're saying. However, even if we assume that desired traits are cultural, it's still bad for the world to penalize thoughtful people. Evolution happens over much longer time-scales and represents a slight force in an extremely noisy environment I disagree. Evolutionary progress took billions of years because nothing in nature favors complex organisms so strongly that amoebas would turn into cats with a straight-arrow certainty. Natural selection is very slow and noisy, as you acknowledged, which is why it happened at an evolutionary (e.g. slow) pace. Throw in artificial selection (e.g. our impact, intentional and otherwise) and the genetic mix can change rapidly. Elephants in Africa are becoming tuskless due to poaching, dogs are a human-made subspecies of the wolf, and fruit flies, with their rapid generations, can be brought to "evolve" well within a human lifetime.