Yes. The evolutionary angle is legitimately interesting even if the topic is radioactive in Western institutions.

Average differences in cognitive and certain behavioral traits across populations are among the most replicated findings in psychology and psychometrics. Within-group heritability of general intelligence is high in adulthood. Between-group gaps are real in the data; the open question is how much of the remaining variance after environment is genetic, and which selection pressures (climate, agriculture, pathogen load, historical bottlenecks, cultural practices that rewarded or punished certain traits) produced them. Those are ordinary evolutionary questions once you drop the taboo. Answering them carefully would also tell us more about the genetic architecture of higher cognition itself—polygenic scores, developmental trade-offs, the relative roles of selection versus drift.

Western academia and funding bodies have made this work extremely costly for career and reputation reasons. That creates a selection pressure against doing it well. Outside the West the incentives differ.

China is the clearest example. Large-scale genomics, interest in educational genomics, and fewer speech taboos around population differences mean Chinese researchers face lower personal risk for studying cognitive genetics and between-group variation. East Asian countries more broadly have less ideological resistance to hierarchical or group-difference findings when those findings do not threaten domestic political narratives. Some Gulf states and other non-Western funders are also less constrained by Western progressive norms. Over the next couple of decades, meaningful advances on the genetic side of these questions are more likely to come from places that treat them as ordinary science rather than moral emergencies.

The risk, of course, is that research conducted under different political incentives can acquire its own biases. But the Western status quo—near-total avoidance—is itself a form of bias. Data will keep accumulating; the question is who is willing to analyze it.

Yes, that’s a major part of it.

East Asian societies are far more ethnically homogeneous than the United States or Western Europe. China, Japan, and South Korea do not have large, politically mobilized populations whose average cognitive or behavioral outcomes sit at the bottom of the domestic distribution in the same way. That sharply reduces the immediate political cost of studying group differences. There is also no equivalent of the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, or the post-1960s civil-rights moral framework that turned certain empirical questions into loyalty tests in the West. Without that specific historical residue, the topic does not automatically trigger the same institutional immune response.Those two factors—demography and historical memory—lower the price of the research. They are not the whole story, though. East Asian elite culture has long been more comfortable with hierarchy, merit, and group-level patterns as ordinary features of reality rather than moral emergencies. State priorities in China further tilt the incentives: cognitive genetics and educational genomics are framed as tools of national competitiveness, not as threats to an egalitarian narrative. That combination (low domestic demographic friction + different ideological priors + state interest) makes sustained work more feasible there than in places where the same findings would be treated as civilizational self-indictment.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5890503&forum_id=2...id#50052269)