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 ...
Of course I'm glad that I could contribute with my own IQ of 160+ .
Plus what?
Agriculture, manufacturing/industry, space exploration, health/medicine advances, etc., the U.S. outshines all others.
We are the undeniable military leader in the world. Not only were we first to posses nuclear arms, we never used this advantage to conquer another nation, instead we defended others, especially Europe, against tyranny.
And the fact that America is the destination of choice amongst most of the world's emigrants lends credence to our being greatest.
As for the attribute "strongest" - who wonders?
Not we.
The US consists of Europeans, Africans and Asians,
The U.S. consist of Americans.
with plenty of rich land even dummies would have made it strong.
So then what's Europe's excuse?
Add the favourable strategic position (with two oceans as natural borders an invasion wasn´t even an option for Hitler).
Germany didn't have to invade us, we went to them, twice.
Eventually, as for the attribute "richest" look up countries like Norway, Switzerland, Monaco or Liechtenstein and feel the way we other Euros feel: poor!
Well then, if another Schicklgruber arises you all can have the wealth-distributors: Norway, Switzerland, Monaco and Liechtenstein, defend you.
Your knowledge of American history is very wanting.
At least you don´t lack the feeling of superiority - or shall I say "arrogancce"?!
Emigrants (at least most) seek prosperity. They choose the country where they can get it with few problems. They come to Europe (from Africa) and to the US (from South America, Middle America). It´s not you, it´s the wealthy countries.
Europe´s excuse? I´d say thousands of years of wars, including dictatorships, oppression up till 1991 (and if we count Belarus, up till today). The US had only one time a war on its soil.
You lack history of Germany - in WW1, no foreign soldier set his foot on German territory, but thanks to the Versailles Treaty, the roots were planted for the rise of nationalism.
So the US consists of Americans? Ok, where did they come from? They´re almost all from other continents. Give me huge land, with the guarantee of few conflicts, and at the same time oppression, famine, dictatorships in the rest of the world and I´ll ensure you that I get the most-skilled people to immigrate.
"Rich" is an adjective that is in no relation with military.
162 on a standardized IQ test, 166 on an IQ test for the highly gifted. I must admit, though, both tests were not administered by psychologists.
Also my Abitur score (the German equivalent of the SAT) was the best in 30 years at my school (However, one of my siblings beat me the following year). You must know that I come from a family of geniuses. When my father spend a year in the US as a high school student he also took an IQ test there and was classified a genius. My brother is a professor of medicine, yet my sister is the smartest of us all: She studied Medicine and Physics at the same time. In high school it took her two afternoons to learn one year of calculus.
Already in elementary school I pissed off my teachers because I already knew everything. One of my high school teachers who was also a professor at the local university praised me (I was a sophomore then IIRC) over his second-year undergraduates. Another referred to me in comparison to other straight A - students with the following words: "Oh, they just learn, wolf78 doesn't need to learn, he understands!". In math class I extrapolated integral calculus from differential calculus (without ever having read about it) just for fun, because of the snail's pace of the classroom discussion of differential calculus.
But maybe I'm just kidding and this is all a load of BS. You'll never know ;-).
"Have you ever read Heidegger? Talk about obtuse! I find Hegel clearer in German than Heidegger."
I have to concur. Heidegger is a pain in the ass to read, especially because of his neologisms. Nietzsche, Leibnitz, Hegel are much more "pleasant" reads.
It's not much better in translation. Anyway, you didn't expect one of the intellectual forefathers of postmodernism to be clear and comprehensible, did you? Look at Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard - where on earth did they learn to write like that? And don't even get me started on Sartre and existentialism ;)
IMHO, Nietzsche wrote some of the best German prose in the 19th century. Beautiful German style! Also much misunderstood both then and now because he was (a) writing metaphorically, which is subject to misinterpretation however well written, and (b) was mad toward the end.
And whose fault was it they were out numbered? Not too bright, now, were they?
This fellow says the Germans were the smartest.
Yea, great job too - now all of the world in involved in cleaning up your mess.
I thought it was due to lead in wall paint.
Hitler was genetically an Austrian - maybe that´s the true reason why the US doesn´t allow naturalized citizens to become president???
In college, I had a couple of friends who were German foreign students.
Not only were they smart, they also were unpretentious. They never bragged about being five times smarter than me; instead, they always tried to improve their English and score with the chicks :-)
Rather difficult, since the poll was about European countries.
Well, there's a lot of people in California who are coming to see the wisdom of that :-)
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