Top: The IQ map of the world
Bottom: Professor Richard Lynn

By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk



...AND NOW AN IQ MAP OF THE WORLD

A researcher thinks that cold weather improves innate intelligence


It seems that Professor Richard Lynn has done it again. Those who have followed my early articles may care to remember that he is the Cambridge educated psychologist who has made it his business to investigate the problems of the third world in terms of human intelligence.

Coming as most of us do from the less industrialised parts of the word and living in the relative cornucopia of the West, the scope for comparison and contrast is enormous.

Years ago, when I was a junior film theatre manager in the West End, one of our cleaners told me one morning that of 20 South Asians in her estimation “only one has a brain.” She carried on to say that some of our Asian attendants gave the impression of not knowing what day of the week it was.

Casting back down memory lane and generalising, I have come to the conclusion that our executive classes are more or less on a par with their Western equivalents. If it were otherwise, how could approximately one-third of the world’s software get to be written in India? The technicians in New Delhi who answer the ‘phones on tech calls about complex machinery (usually computers) must have a brain cell or two each.

However, it is difficult to deny that in the broad sweep of things the bulk of the populations, when matched against each other, do appear to present significant differences in terms of intellectual performance. This is reinforced by the “findings” of Professor Lynn’s most recent work.

The work in question is Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis which would have sparked off a major debate had it been more highly aired. At any rate, the central finding is that, in the author’s view, the world mean IQ is approximately 90 while the average for European countries is 100.

Now, professional psychology, like so many other professions is a bit of a club. All sorts of people do courses in psychology but to actually earn a living out of it requires various kinds of social approval without which the ticket at the end is an empty qualification and whatever is learnt becomes mere background knowledge and skills.

One of the most dangerous specialities in experimental psychology is the field of intelligence. Making contrasts between one person and another is quite all right. It is safe to say: “Johnny is more intelligent that Susan” because that is subsumed under the title of individual differences. I once studied an option for a term at university entitled “Individual Differences” and the teaching staff was quite safe as a result. Their jobs remained secure as long as the fields of enquiry were all about comparing and contrasting one person with another.

Where the study of intelligence becomes dangerous and a route to membership of the unemployment statistics for the psychologist concerned is when he decides to enquire into group differences. Therefore, it is indeed unsafe to say that one region of Bangladesh is higher in intelligence than another region or that one gender is more intelligent than the other.

The most perilous field of all is inter-racial intelligence testing with inter-racial analyses. An experimental psychologist may come to bitterly regret his first lesson on psychometrics while standing in line on the dole queue. This is the water into which Professor Richard Lynn has put his feet.

My point is that this subject is a favourite stamping ground for bigots and xenophobes and that when looking at claims from a person, no matter how prestigiously qualified and approved, one should take care to examine his hidden agenda. In the case of Lynn it is appropriate to ask whether or not his basic motivation is to recreate a White Britain with no black, brown or yellow faces to spoil the view.

So, an adult IQ of 90 is the same as the average level of a European 14-year-old boy. In the United kingdom such a person would still be one or two years away from taking his GCSE examinations and four years from entering university if he was to go that far in education.

Furthermore, Lynn has been thoughtful enough to produce for our pleasure an IQ map of the world. In other circumstances this would be enough to cause an explosion of outrage from certain quarters but his book has received little publicity.

He reckons that cold winters are evolutionarily beneficial insofar that the cognitive strains of planning ahead for a time of dearth during a time of plenty requires the ability to think in a relatively long timeframe. All this the earliest generations of mankind would have had to learn after migrating out of the comfort zone of Africa with year round warm or hot weather and edible plants and animals everywhere and all the time.

Quite apart from Lynn’s research other persons have concluded that the Ice Ages did more than anything else to sharpen the mental and physical abilities of humans. The need to optimise the scanty resources of a short growing season every year and having to hunt large dangerous animals such as mammoth entailed basic management skills and the ability to cooperate in groups for mutually advantageous ends. No man by himself could bring down even a small mammoth, but forty men could.

Even the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, may have had a selective effect on the human gene pool as regards Europeans and East Asians. Many species failed to adapt to the warm climate such as the mammoths, the sabre tooth cats and the woolly rhinoceroses. In the case of the sabre tooth, it is thought by biologists that they were ambush predators whose method of getting food was to climb onto an overhanging branch of a tree and simply drop down upon passing prey. When grasslands took over from forests they found that they lacked the speed to catch their quarries. So they became extinct.

It is possible that some humans failed to adapt to the warm too and died as a result. One thinks of cold-adapted Neanderthal man whose extremely strong but slow physique could not cope with the faster requirements of warm weather living.

Lynn regards genetic clusters as “races.” He concludes that the East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) have the highest mean IQ at 105. The Europeans follow with an IQ of 100. Some way below these are the Inuit (IQ 91), South East Asians (IQ 87), Native American Indians (IQ 87), Pacific Islanders (IQ 85), South Asians and North Africans (IQ 84). Well below these come the sub-Saharan Africans (IQ 67) followed by the Australian Aborigines (IQ 62). The lowest scoring of all are the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert together with the Pygmies of the Congo rain forests (IQ 54).
These “findings”, if watertight, contain a deep geopolitical significance. They imply that it may simply not be possible to transmit Western-style democratic and economic systems to the populations of Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East and least of all to sub-Saharan Africa. They may signify that that the world’s long-term problems arise from different populations' capabilities, which are more profound and intractable than any “Clash of Civilisations” which appears to be the fashionable political method of explaining cultural conflicts.
One research result which is of high significance, I think, is that the East Asians have slightly higher intelligence scores as measured on the standard intelligence tests while it is well known that most of the great inventions and discoveries of recent centuries have been made by Europeans and not East Asians.
One explanation is that Asians tend to be more innately conservative than Westerners and less likely to want to experiment with unknown untried and untested things. Also, in East Asia conformist lifestyles are the norm while in the West individualism is valued as a way of living. Nevertheless, Chinese boxing and gunpowder were both developed and invented in China.
Another interesting result is the relatively low IQ score of the Inuit. Researchers have found that, other things equal, intelligence is proportional to brain size and, like other cold weather peoples, the Inuit have large brains. One explanation is that they have inbred to the point where their intelligence has lowered.
Lynn reckons that the genetic and environmental factors have a 50-50 influence on mental ability. This contrasts with both the traditional right wing view that genes are everything and the liberal one that environments control intelligence totally.
There are lessons in all of this for us. One conclusion is that we should breed in larger groups instead of the traditional South Asian marriage, which usually takes place between two members of the same extended family, typically two second cousins. Another is that children and young people, especially, should be encouraged to encounter a wide variety of influences, if that can be done in safety.
Although Professor Lynn is endangering his career in the academia of Ireland by doing and publishing this kind of research my basic feeling is that he is the vanguard of a time which is shortly to come when his viewpoint will be the majority one.
Therefore, it behoves us to progress genetically and environmentally because when the Europeans have recovered from the exhaustion of fighting the Cold War they will surely attend to the problem of what is to be done with us.

THE END

This article was published in the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the Bangladeshi community of the United Kingdom - read all over the world from the Arctic to the Antarctic.