Posted on 03/27/2006 1:35:38 AM PST by wolf78
BRITAIN and France have experienced long periods of conflict and rivalry but now victory in one area can be claimed: Britons are more intelligent than the French.
A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.
Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. “The early human beings in northerly areas had to survive during cold winters when there were no plant foods and they were forced to hunt big game,” he said. “The main environmental influence on IQ is diet, and people in southeast Europe would have had less of the proteins, minerals and vitamins provided by meat which are essential for brain development.”
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
I don't know. I've been told that sized DOES matter! (*sob*)
I have read that Askenazi Jews are an unusual group when it comes to this topic. You quoted the 108 number for Americans who are Jews, but they are not all from the Ashkenazi.
Apparently 1000 years of ghettoization, a fairly signficant amount of inbreeding and being forced into certain jobs may have been a strange experiment in genetic engineering.
The existence of Tay-sachs in this population is also a consequence. The theory goes that bankers and jewellers and the other professions to which Jews were limited during the middle ages required high IQs to be done properly. As a result, natural selection favoured those who had higher IQs. However, the brain requires a very large amount of a special kind of fat (actually cholesterol). If you get one gene taht allows for the excess fat to be present, you are smart. If you get 2, you get Tay-Sachs.
It is just a theory, but an interesting one. I am looking for where I found it. I think it might have been a blurb in the Economist.
What do you think?
I took an IQ test once.
Came back negative.
Sure. The Popes slaughtered the smart Frenchmen for centuries. That's why they're left with an inferior gene pool.
Probably even lower. Which should make the other nations of this world, especially those in Europe, feel pretty inadequate since the U.S., in only 150 years, grew to become the world's strongest, richest, and greatest country in the history of mankind.
As for the attribute "greatest", this is certainly self-proclaimed, and there´s no objective criteria for it. As for the attribute "strongest" - who wonders? The US consists of Europeans, Africans and Asians, with plenty of rich land even dummies would have made it strong. Add the favourable strategic position (with two oceans as natural borders an invasion wasn´t even an option for Hitler).
Eventually, as for the attribute "richest" look up countries like Norway, Switzerland, Monaco or Liechtenstein and feel the way we other Euros feel: poor! :-)
Let's be franco - EVERYONE on earth is smarter than the French. This latest round of riots by French "utes" is proof enough!!
Reads as though a caterer is seeking a contract with MENSA.
Meetings generally favor quantity over quality, so it could be a sweet contract.
There are not many skinny members. Food is very important at Regional Gatherings, and at hospitality rooms, one must be fast during the feeding frenzy, or go unfed.
The dog has me trained to take him for a walk, the cat trained me to feed him at 8am, and the wife can ring a bell and I take the garbage out Friday morning 9am sharp.
I don't know what my IQ is but I think it's shot.
One interesting fact is that IQ tends toward the mean, that is two bright parents will probably have a bright child, but over time, the deviation from the mean will lessen, if not disappear. Similarly, dull parents children may be dull, but over time the further generations will tend to be closer to the mean. That said, anecdotal evidence suggests exceptionally high IQ does tend to run in families, just as does musical genius and other forms of genius.
A nonsense. It is a well know fact that animals and men living in the colder climate tend to be larger. This professor's IQ must be low.
Of course all tests designed by humans are imperfect. Regardless it would seem difficult to create a test that truly measured intelligence that was not somehow influenced by environment.
It would seem a not inappropriate assumption that intelligent parents also tend to be better parents (i.e. providers) and tehrefore children of intelligent parents would have additional environmental benefits.
I am not familiar with arguments as to whether the IQ tests truly are separate from environmental factors. Can one improve one's IQ test scores by practising?
Hardly surprising, since instead of starting from zero, your nation was blessed from the outset by inheriting the best culture, the best system of law, the best system of govt, the ideals of the magna carta and the best language in the world form Britain. America started from the top, not the bottom, so you had most of the hard work already done for you. . . . :D
I think the consensus of the research on IQ is that it's primarily genetic, but certainly can be influenced at the margin by environment. The best (regarded as most reliable) IQ tests are individually administered by a trained psychologist and so cannot really be practiced, but certainly there can be practice for the mass administered IQ tests and the IQ proxy tests like the older Scholastic Aptitude Test (now called just the SAT and generally no longer regarded as a reasonable IQ proxy). It has been said that good coaching will typically enable a student to raise an SAT score by about 100 to 150 points (on a scale of 1600), or about 10%. At the margins, that can be quite significant, the difference in percentage ranking of a 1250 score and a 1400 score is huge say moving from a 70th percentile to 90th percentile -- the difference between being admitted only to the second or third tier of colleges and being admitted to the first tier (for which scores of around 1400 are a minimum).
The difference between the yanks and the brits, is the yanks think they rule the world by having the biggest army and occasionally invading small countries and then leaving, the brits know they are the greatest because we're only small but we did ACTUALLY rule the world directly with a quarter of the land and a third of the worlds population directly under British rule and that empire resulted in all the best countries in the world. . . . :D
In all seriousness, there is something about the evolution of English institutions and the character of the English and Scots that has worked out substantially better than our Continental cousins. Perhaps its that uncommon commodity common sense, a sense of proportion and a disinclination radical intellectualism.
It's really interesting. Read English philosophy, especially Locke, Hume, Burke and the like, and the American founders: they're eminently sensible. Read the Continental philosophers like Descartes, the philosophes, Kant, Hegel and their epigoni -- they're all taken with their own brilliance and abstraction almost for its own sake. In the Anglo-sphere, theory serves to illuminate praxis, on the Continent theory is admired for it's own sake. To slightly twist Ernst Cassierer's characterization of the Enlightenment vs. prior Europan thought, the Continent is given to l'esprit de system while the Anglo-sphere is given to l'esprit systematique.
I feel sorry for those, who still long for the days of the Empire. The reality is not bad at all, so let´s embrace the future instead of the past!
Oh, and welcome to FR!
I believe the articles you refer to were mentioned here on FR.
Now, that's not entirely true. Continental philosophers do occasionally turn theory towards more practical, real-world applications. Martin Heidegger, for example.
German Students! The National Socialist revolution brings complete upheaval to our German life....Do not let dogmas and “ideas” be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law. Learn always to know more deeply: from now on every matter requires decision and every action responsibility.:^)- Heidegger, Freiburger Studenten Zeitung (Nov. 1933)
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