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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

There's something wrong here... most (and most populous) countries have IQ below 100, but IQ 100 is defined as being the average of human populations. Unless other continents have significantly more intelligent people than in Europe (seems unlikely), then this chart must be significantly uncalibrated.

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Maybe the overall IQ has lowered since we set the standard of 100? :)

As the movie "Idiocracy" put it, evolution does not necesserily reward intelligence.

On the contrary, raw IQ rises about 3 points per decade. The Flynn Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

OTOH, the 2012 map shows generally lower numbers than the 2007 map, which seems to suggest that Europe is running contrary to the general trend.

The whole article is about how the 2007 map was biased and how the 2012 map attempts to correct this bias. So you can't compare them the way you do it.

The only thing in the article about the relation to the older map is "Since the maps above [the 2012 maps] are based on more recent data, the map shown here [the 2007 map] should be considered outdated."

There's not one word in the linked piece about bias in the older map, so saying that's what the whole article is about is, well, odd.

> Unless other continents have significantly more intelligent people than in Europe (seems unlikely)

Why does this seem unlikely?

It's unlikely that 1) there are significant differences in intelligence between different continents 2) that IQ, which is significantly influenced by education, would be lower in Europe where education is rather decent (probably at least in the better half, if you were to sort the world by quality of education).

> It's unlikely that 1) there are significant differences in intelligence between different continents

Given the known individual drivers of IQ, which are things not equal by continent, that seems dubious.

> that IQ, which is significantly influenced by education, would be lower in Europe where education is rather decent (probably at least in the better half, if you were to sort the world by quality of education).

Yeah, but the 100 IQ average wasn't set globally in the first place, its the average of the norming sample of the test, and most (all) of the test were developed in the first world with norming samples drawn from there.

Western Europe being a hair below first-world average (and Eastern europe farther below it) in the first world isn't at all surprising.

Is a single point difference significant?

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