Maybe these guys who say that women have lower IQs are only able to do so because they live in a country where it is tough to buy a gun (“an armed society is a polite society”). This part seems less likely to get Professor Lynn killed:
“He published a controversial study in 2003 that identified a clear correlation between the levels of prosperity in 60 countries and the average IQ of their populations.”
[Stop the presses: Countries in which all of the smart people have emigrated don’t do that well. Actually that sounds like the U.K. (many of whose smartest citizens are working at American universities where the pay is vastly higher, or have emigrated to Australia for a bit of sunshine).]
It will be interesting to read the full paper when it comes out. One challenge to this research is the fact that women do better in school than men, even at pretty high levels. Could it be that a slightly lower IQ helps people get A grades at top high schools and colleges? What would professors have to say about that?
Regfarding IQ vs grades: both IQ and grades are attempts to describe a multidimensional entity (the human mind) with a one-dimensional number – something has to be lost in this mapping! IMHO women are better than men as far as attention to detail and memorizing is concerned. These skills are good to have and help get better grades but are not well reflected in IQ. On the other hand, IQ contains a pretty good measurement of abstract/spatial thinking. The result is that women have made a lot of progress in law and medicine (where attention to detail and memorizing help) but less in math and hard sciences. Instead of trying to blame this on discrimination, women should be happy, as law and medicine pay better than science.
Philip, what about all the Australian smarties that move to the UK, exchanging sunshine for better pay?
I have to agree with Jon as well. I know for a fact that I have a reasonably high (2nd percentile) IQ, yet obviously less smart people without the problem solving skills that I have got better grades in school. And in my school days, the word “intelligence” was a taboo word in the Netherlands; everyone was supposed to be the same and how well you did depended on how hard you worked. We also didn’t (don’t?) have aptitude tests like your SATs to spot people like me who might do very well accademicaly despite average high school grades. In fact, universities aren’t even allowed to accept people with the highest grades either, you just need them high enough and it’s a lottery from there. There was the case of a straight A+ girl who didn’t get into med school two years running due to not winning te lottery. Absurd…
PS: Despite the gun laws, I don’t think many foreigners would describe the US as a “polite society”, more like “politicaly correct”. There is a difference between the two, you know?
everyone was supposed to be the same and how well you did depended on how hard you worked
Wow. A friend of mine (an economics professor at Harvard) once lectured about an economic model of future income of an individual, which included (along with other variables) individual’s talent, measured by IQ. A student rose up and protested that “we are all alike” – almost exactly the same argument!
Of course the people who say these things also believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. But if there were no differences between individual minds, our brains wouldn’t evolve!
As TS Eliot said, “Mankind cannot stand too much reality.”
I should add one more thing to my first posting. My grades in high school were average, even though I have high IQ (IQ did not predict my grades!) – simply because I concentrated on two subjects that I loved and was excellent in, Math and Physics, and neglected the rest. My average grades did not prevent me from getting a Ph.D. from MIT. On the other hand, my high school female classmates had better average grades than me but they were not excellent in anything.
I would hypothesize that high IQ predicts excellence in something rather than good grades.
If you listened to the BBC’s reporting on the announcement of this story (which also ran in the Rupert Murdoch owned _The Australian_), you would’ve heard some rather hilarious reactions from brits on the street.
One couple argued over the findings. The wife disagreed that this finding was true since men can only do/think/focus on one thing at a time, while women can do many things at once. Her husband scoffed at this suggestion and argued that yes, it is because men do one thing at a time that they are more clever. Men do one thing really well, while women do many things and don’t finish any of them.
The wife responded, that her husband couldn’t bother to put a kettle on while waiting for his toast.
So, maybe men are more intelligent, if we mean by this that they are sort OCD-like in their focus on one thing.
Maybe men perform better at IQ tests because the tests measure skills that men excel in. Like aspazia said, why can’t multitasking be a measure of intelligence?
I think it would be difficult to design a multiple choice test that would measure multitasking ability. In other words, it’s a general problem with tests, not merely with IQ tests.
A problem with using SAT as an admission criterion is that a future genius poet may have a horrible math score. Likewise, a math genius may have a horribly low verbal score.
Philip I don’t know where your going with the gun reference. Are you just trolling? Okay flame war: Lotta people got guns (and RPGs, etc) in Iraq, and of couse everyone knows that is a very polite part of the world. Yawn.
I don’t hold a lot of stock in IQ tests. I would have to agree with Jon about the spatial bias of IQ tests. I have taken two IQ tests in my life, one was the WAIS test, I can’remember the other, but it was very similar. They were taken ten years apart. Both were administered by a psycologist. The scores I got were more than 50 points apart, the first one was 130, the second was in the 180’s, which is laughable. I have been told that unless you have a very average score, they are simply not that accurate in indicating anything. I’m not that smart: I was a classic underachiever until I got into college. I have had trouble with dyslexia in elementary school, which might explain that, but I tend to dismiss it.
Hmm, lots of babbling about IQ, and very little about the author of the study, Richard Lynn from the University of Ulster. For a quick summary of Lynn’s credentials, you might want to look at this article:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1271
And I find the tone of your post to be quite snarky. It’s clear that this is just junk-science being regurgitated by a lazy, scientifically-illiterate media. I’d feel a bit shamefaced if I myself had lazily passed on the research as being something for consideration.
“Countries in which all of the smart people have emigrated don’t do that well.”
ireland experienced mass emigration. those who could afford it were no doubt richer, and smarter.
ireland now has one the healthiest economies in the EU.
John, ad hominem attacks – such as the article from fair.org – may work on Internet, but are not scientifically valid. Naureckas’ main argument is that some people (Lynn among them) received funding from controversial sources and associated themselves with controversial people. That’s like saying that Quantum Mechanics is invalid because Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg collaborated with the Nazis. Likewise, is research into health effects of smoking invalid because Nazis funded it?
Maybe higher levels of prosperity give people higher IQ? Women may have lower IQ because they aren’t educated to do IQ tests. What is wrong is the belief that intelligence is only some innate quantity when it is strongly related to environmental factors as well.
Jon,
What to your mind would demonstrate that Lynn is not a reliable scientist? The fact that Philip takes one quote from the BBC’s article out of context to make a snarky remark about Europe is one thing — it’s quite another to subsequently read about Lynn’s associations with Rushton and the rest of a racist cadre of pseudo-researchers and to simply deny it all as an “ad hominem” attack.
Of course, invoking Nazism makes your argument sound ridiculous on its face. But are now comparing Lynn ot Planck and Heisenberg? Are you comparing his research on IQ to that of quantum mechanics, or smoking? Just wondering, because the whole point of science seems to be validation via peer-review and reproduction? QM is *highly* confirmed. The health effects of smoking are *highly* confirmed. Where is the peer-review of Lynn? It *is* a legitimate question to ask who (and who has funded) the confirmatory research on IQ, just as one questions tobacco-company-funded research that “demonstrates” no health effects of smoking.
In my opinion, Lynn belongs alongside Intelligent Design “scientists” — people with a quite-virulent ideological axe to grind, and whom hide behind the neutrality granted by claiming membership in the scientific community. If you have a stronger opinion about Lynn’s research, then lets make it simple: first, are you willing to deny that Lynn is a racist, and that his research is a crock? Second, if so, please provide some citations in mainstream publications within the past 10 years that cite his work, and/or confirmatory peer-reviewed research.
John, we have a fundamental philosophical difference. I want to judge a book by its contents, you want to judge it by its cover (to wit, the name that’s printed on the cover.)
What I have observed as a major difference between men and women is that men think in long-term while women think in short-term. That is, women want the best-and-everything now without much consideration for long term effect, while men want to know how thinks would far-out if they get the best-and-everything now so they tend to take longer time to make a decision and act.
Charles Murray published an article in Commentary. He discusses, among other things, men’s and women’s IQ.
Aha!
Obviously this study is really a study on reactions to bias in studies cleverly disquised as a study on gender and IQ.
It’s pretty hilarious how everybody is quick to trot out individual testimonials to back up whatever cultural notions they hold regarding gender and intelligence (or even flavor of intelligence).
Of course none of it holds any scientific weight, but it attracts a lot of attention (like a crowd attracts a crowd).
It’s too bad really that people cannot have their attention drawn to the ‘little’ things like nutrition, early stimulus and effective education that really hold some sway over intelligence, much more so than gender.
Just my two bits, now lets get back to some more intelligent debate of nazi funding of research into iraqi social morays…
isn’t it pretty easy to observe that there is just alot more variance in males compared to females? variance in inteligence, stupidity, levels of violence, deviant behaviour, etc.
there are alot more super smart men than women and there are alot more super moronic men than women. there are also a lot more serial murderers who are male.
it is a worthy goal to try to make sure that talented and capable women are treated fairly in the work force and in college admissions, but to think that as a group, women are equal to men is hard for me to accept besed on what i’ve seen.
Jon, the problem with this as “science” is that anyone who understands science would know that the research will be flawed, so wont do it. I suggest reading Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J Gould. An easy argument to make is that prosperity causes higher IQ, and a lot more likely to be correct.
It’s too bad really that people cannot have their attention drawn to the ‘little’ things like nutrition, early stimulus and effective education that really hold some sway over intelligence, much more so than gender.
Nutrition? That’s a wild one, unless there is some evidence of girls being fed different food than boys.
Sorry, I meant to write this
Aspiring Female Traffickers Lack Role Models, Notes Expert
But what we’re really talking about here is that there are more male geniuses than female geniuses. I find it hard to believe that prosperity, nutrition, and education can really explain this effect.
Even if you guys want to deny the IQ claim, it still stands that men greatly outnumber women as winners of Nobel Prizes, chess championships and other things traditionally associated with being really, really smart. Redefining “intelligence” doesn’t get around the issue.
(er, yeah, that’s a response to Gary’s post, not the Steve Sailer article, don’t worry)
The “one hundre percent nurture” theory reminds me of the twilight years of the Soviet Union. That it was a total failure, was clear to everybody except Soviet Union’s fans in the West who kept making up excuses such as “they were poor before Communism” or “what they had implemented wasn’t true Communism” or “the have to spend precious resources on the military to protect themselves from aggressive NATO” etc.
Likewise, excuse du jour is “nutrition, early stimulus and effective education”. Let’s see – we feed girls the same food, we send them to the same preschools. We send them to the same coed public schools and if you read elementary and middle school textbooks, you get impression that most scientists are females. Still, as Sean pointed out, hardly any female science Nobel Prize winners or chessmasters. They have won more Nobel Peace Prizes, though.
I find it particularly disturbing when people attempt to take satistical analysis of broad groups and apply them to individual occurances.
Describing overall averages of intelligence of any grouping (gender, race, nationality) is the former, trying to identify traits to an individual (whether a colleague or prize winner)is the latter.Even the people that write these studies cite that there are broader ranges of variation within the groups than there are between them. That is so say, that generalizations do not apply to individuals.Since we are stuck with generalizations, I say we keep is as general as possible and say that human intelligence is affected by a number of different things. I would also go on to say that many outward appearances, such as the award of Nobel Prizes, has less to do with intelligence, and more to do with the social structures that are prevalent in the society.I would then claim that more Nobel Prozes are awarded to men because we live in a largely patriarchical society, discoveries are made by teams, and men (most likely) head those teams…
But, for the most part, I think that these studies are just more ammo for idiots, a group I have joined by even discussing this, Cheers! And yes, Jon, you are a troll
Intelligence is indeed multidimensional. However, no matter how many different kinds of cognitive tests you come up with, including some of the things mentioned here like “multitasking” and “attention to detail”, when you do a factor analysis there is ALWAYS one factor which accounts for a big majority of the variance. This is referred to in the literature as “g”, and if you have a high “g” you will do better on ALL kinds of mental tests. That doesn’t mean “g” is determined only by genetics, and it doesn’t mean that appropriate education can’t increase “g”, but it IS stable enough that the statement “men are more likely to have very high “g” or very low “g” than women is very well-established.
That male “geniuses” appear more common is not due solely to this. A big part of that effect comes from men being much more likely to devote themselves intensely and singlemindedly to a particular mental accomplishment (at the expense of a well-balanced life). Another big part of it is that the key years for “works of genius” are also the key years for raising children, and women geniuses are less willing to sacrifice a great deal of attention to their children than men are.
But even with those two factors considered, men still are more likely to have a high “g”. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an Emmy Noether (who was as good as any male mathematician of her day) or a Judith Polgar (who is world-class in chess, regularly making the “top 10” list, and at age 29 has not reached her peak yet), but women will never make up 50% of the very topmost rank in math or chess.
Damn everyone one here seems to have a high iq. My iq is 112 and it is depressing because i am going for an engineering degree and i don’t know if my so called boy abilitys are good enough. HOw far can perserverance and determination take a person with an iq score as low as mine
I have been trying to figure out the answer to this question for some time now. I will be competing with people who can do the same amount of work as me in half the time becaues their iq is higher not because they work harder. My verbal score was 103 and my performance was 126