A Chart Describing IQ vs. Religiosity

At minimun, we know that education is significant. But yes, there are many factors.

The human mind is like an ogre.. You know.. it has many layers (yeah, a Shrek joke). Religion is very much like a mental illness, a misfiring of our mental shortcomings, like giving in into social pressure, obeying authority figures, prefering comforting lies over inconvenient truths and so on.
One can be a logical, intelligent, learned person and worship some figment of imagination or believe stupid things, because, although intelligence and the ability to connect dots does factor in a lot to one’s religious views, these qualities are sometimes, perhaps more often than not not sufficient to prevent the treason of reason.

Anybody bothered by the apparent racism in the chart? Perhaps my own intelligence is off here, but am I to believe that Africans are idiots?

To quote Jeff Spicoli: I don’t know.

No, but they are more likely to be malnourished, which can knock off a few IQ points. Before the developed world developed, the same thing used to be common among European poor. 

what.

I recall reading somewhere that the single largest indicator of IQ in a large population was nutrition. The waggley eyed suggestion from correlation may be that crushing poverty and famine cause low IQ and high religiosity.

Solange, if by the “obvious racism of this chart” you mean the clustering of African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Central and South American countries in the lower part of the IQ axis, I think you may be seeing the effect of early childhood malnourishment, as Elizabeth L has pointed out in her comment above.

It probably does not have anything to do with race, and I don’t understand how racism would be the cause of this clustering unless the people making the chart were deliberately misreporting the data in order to falsely represent the races of the people in those countries as intrinsically less intelligent.  If you think that is the case, that would be reprehensible, but I don’t know how you could be sure that that is the case here.

I think if there was  a similar chart with IQ and childhood nutrition being the compared scales, you would see a very similar grouping of the higher ranked and the lower ranked IQ countries.

In the UK an IQ of 75 is considered the threshold score for learning disability. So according to this chart most of the African population are learning disabled??? Utter nonsense. If this chart indicates anything it’s the flawed nature of IQ testing and methodology.

1st: The definition of the word racist is not “I don’t like it or what it implies”, last I checked.

2nd: A lot of the IQ tests I’ve seen require the ability to read and write, which puts poor people in poor countries at a disadvantage, what with their bizarre insistence on avoiding starvation instead of other activities we take for granted.

These are the sort of charts routinely missused by so-called “race realists” (AKA racists) to try to justify the notion that IQ and race are somehow linked. Naturally the person affirming it and bleating that “it’s science!” is always a member of the “favored” race. If you ever want to have a little fun with one of these people, ask them what the biological definition of race is, and then ask “What race is Obama?”.

Well, it could be said that “your are to believe that Africans are idiots”, if only the IQ test was a score of “native intelligence”, as the people who designed it believed.

But we’ve made progress since then.

For fuck’s sake, is it that hard to look up Richard Lynn, or to find heavy, serious critiques of the IQ data published by him and his research group?

Some initial reading:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17456279

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., Carlson,
J. S., & van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). Another failure to
replicate Lynn’s estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans.
Learning and Individual Differences, 20, 155-157. IQAfricaRavenrej.pdfWicherts,
J. M., Borsboom, D., & Dolan, C. V. (2010). Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of
intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 91-96. nationalIQPAID.pdf DATASET in SPSS format (use “save as” to download)

Wicherts,
J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der
Maas, H. L.
J. (2010). The dangers of unsystematic selection methods and the
representativeness of 46 samples of African test-takers [rejoinder to
Lynn & Meisenberg, 2010]
Intelligence, 38, 30-37. IQrejoinder.pdf

It would be nice if we could not associate ourselves with vicious, unscientific racists, thanks.

All I know is, the more secular a country or even a state is in the USA, the less problems them have; less unplanned pregnancies, less uneducated populace, less war, less begging the government for money, more equality among residents/citizens, etc… all in all, I dont see how you can put it any other way than that; The more secular, the better for all.

You do realize that each country on that graph is not made up of solely one ethnic group, right?  Not really sure how it can be racism since all the countries that are in the higher IQ section are made up of more than just one ethnicity.

school counselors cannot conduct IQ testing on African American students.

Really? Which school counselors, where?

You know what bothered me about this chart? While Piro goes to some length to note that he is well aware that correlation does not equal causation*, he doesn’t actually tell us what the correlation is. The chart is at least a bit ambiguous, although it does appear to show a correlation, I don’t know what that correlation actually is because there’s no R^2 score.

*It’s actually not true that “correlation does not imply causation”, correlation does in fact imply causation, that’s the whole point of correlation. What it doesn’t do is prove, equal, demonstrate, or show causation. But it does imply it.

YES. The sloganizing of “correlation is not causation” has worked too well, and now you can even find people acting as if correlation contradicts causation.

This is assuming that the test is designed in an objective way.  The idea that “intelligence” is one variable that can be measured on a linear scale seems pretty silly to begin with.  I think that Solange’s point is that it’s not surprising a test designed by “white people” and loaded with their cultural assumptions gives results where different ethnic/geographic groups tend to cluster together.  An IQ test can be useful within a group in order to look at the effect of other variables such as nutrition, but when the test is given to someone outside of that group, you just get a meaningless number.  Africa has nutrition problems, but that doesn’t explain IQ score averages two standard deviations below the mean.   Stephen Jay Gould’s book _The Mismeasure of Man_ is a decent (but a bit dated) intro to this topic.

Sounds like your mind is pretty closed on the subject of religion = mental illness.

Thank you Cortex, that’s an important point. So many surveys I’ve read about comparative religiosity in the US or in various countries are based on questions that can inadvertently be measuring something other than a level of personal fervent conviction of belief, or whatever the hell we mean by religiosity. 

It’s the way IQ tests are made. An IQ of 100 is average. What people have to understand is that they are continuously adjusted so that most people score around 100. So as the population becomes more educated, the tests come harder. You can easily see that the way all western countries are around the 100 mark.

It’s not so much racism, but some form of cultural superiority. IQ tests are designed with western standards in mind. The correct reading isn’t that western people are smarter, but that they have a better education. If you want to accurately measure people’s “intelligence” in other countries, you have to adjust the tests to local conditions. Then you can see who – on a local level – is above or below average

I’d say it measures one’s abilities compared to people with a comparable education or maybe a comparable life experience.

If a large part of the population is only semi-literate or doesn’t have more than basic maths skills, it’s no wonder they fail some parts of these tests. Doesn’t make them dumber. Just less educated

Read the original bloody papers that this chart relies on before you provide excuses for the researchers, since Lynn et al believe hunger, poverty, etc in Africa are CAUSED by black Africans having low IQ.

Lynn’s national IQ estimates are crap.  They rely on small, non-representative samples (ie Ethiopia’s is from a small group of 15yo Ethiopian immigrants to Israel), are heavily biased (Lynn’s group rejected African scores that seemed “too high”), and most of them (about 100 countries) are in fact estimated from calculating IQ weighted by race in neighbouring countries, in a way that has yet to be reliably replicated.

Furthermore, in many cases they aren’t using global WAIS or WISC scores, but sub-scores or even “proxies” of IQ.

The chart is bad science, and shouldn’t be passed around at all.

DEar Friendly Atheist, 
Proof your friendliness by reading the Quran, where it says that Allah created humans (including atheist) as races and tribes ( showing unequality) to know and help each other.So the high IQ races should help the low IQ humans. Not fighting each oher! OK !??

See Zvan’s further rebuttal of this mess of a chart, here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2011/12/27/or-male-atheists-have-small-penises/