"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."
Curious, then, that temperate Holland is "smarter" than any of the cold countries, and warm Italy is smarter than Sweden, England, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or, actually, anywhere that's really, really cold.
Russia is as cold as it gets, but the're down there in the French range, on the charts.
The Dutch, much as they doth protest, are completely indistinguishable from the northern Germans right across the border. In the Middle Ages, Dutch and Flemings were considered Germans, and indiscriminately mixed with other Germans, especially in settling Silesia, Posen, and Prussia. The artificial division is an artifact of the religious wars of the 16th century, and the abberation of establishing Plattdeutsch, and a phonetic spelling thereof, as the official language of the Netherlands, and Hochdeutsch as the official language of Germany. The Flemings of Belgium, at least, are honest enough to admit this openly, and at the various times they have been occupied by the Germans, have eagerly collaborated with those they viewed as their ethnic kinfolk.
and warm Italy is smarter than Sweden, England, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or, actually, anywhere that's really, really cold.
Well, it was the ROMAN Empire and the ROMAN Catholic Church which held sway for so long, not the SWEDISH Empire and SWEDISH Catholic Church. Surely there is something to this IQ-wise. When the wide ranging Norsemen came into contact with Constantinople New Rome, the best thing they could come up with there was to be body-guards to the Romans. In Russia, England, France, Ireland, Sicily, etc., the Varangians became the rulers. In Old and New Rome, they became servants.
One wonders at how well the Lombards of northern Italy and the Tuscano-Roman population of the center must compare to the population of Naples and Sicily.
Russia is as cold as it gets, but the're down there in the French range, on the charts.
French results are probably polluted by the large Muslim presence, just as White Americans are dragged down the IQ chart by our Blacks and Hispanic compatriots (neither of whom should feel particularly bad about that, because if they would go home to Africa and Latin America, our subpopulations would be the master-race/high-IQ folks of those lands BY FAR). Russia has similar Muslim issues, as well as the historical artifact of having killed off the brightest folks in the Kulak purges and two world wars and a truly horrific abortion holocaust. 70 years of Communism has left nothing but the stupidest and most docile people to tell the sad tale. There may be a similar force at work in France from the large losses to wars and revolution from Louis XIV through WWI, combined with an early adoption of a birth control mentality long before there were birth control devices of any use (thus those who succeeded in not reproducing were probably the cleverest of the population - a disgenic problem for France).
The very low IQ of the Balkans region should probably be attributed to the Turkish yoke, depopulation, and Jannissary laws.