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."
He added that differences in intelligence across Britain could be attributed to bright people moving to London over hundreds of years. Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, higher than Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. People living in London and the South East average 102. "Once in the capital they have settled and reared children, and these children have inherited their high intelligence and transmitted it to further generations." ...
Professor Lynn ascribes the differences between British and French intelligence levels to the results of military conflict. He described it as "a hitherto unrecognised law of history" that "the side with the higher IQ normally wins, unless they are hugely outnumbered, as Germany was after 1942".
More here
One would have to know a lot more about the data to make sense of all this. The British results could for instance have been deflated by the large number of U.K. citizens of African and rural Pakistani ancestry
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The new pragmatic Israel: "Thirteen miles inside the Palestinian-majority West Bank, Israeli bulldozers are trying to lay out the Jewish state's new borders in concrete and razor wire. As Israeli voters head to the polls tomorrow, the ruling Kadima party created by Ariel Sharon has redrawn the political landscape and is now trying to secure its place in history by seeking unilaterally to redraw Israel's boundaries. The giant earthen scar running beneath the Jewish settlement of Ariel reflects the "separation" strategy of Mr Sharon - which is set to propel Kadima to electoral victory even though he lies comatose in a hospital in Jerusalem after suffering a massive stroke in January. Under the plan - the centrepiece of Kadima's appeal to the voters - Israel will withdraw from remote Jewish settlements outside the barrier to secure its hold on the huge settlement blocs around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that it really wants to keep".
Good speech by Tony Blair on his Australian visit: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair used a speech to Federal Parliament today to urge global unity in the fight against terrorism and warn against the "madness" of growing anti-Americanism worldwide. Mr Blair said war against terror was as much a battle about values as it was about arms, and that those values were the universal property of humanity. "(It is also) a struggle about values and about modernity, whether to be at ease with it or enraged at it," said Mr Blair, the fifth world leader to address Federal Parliament. "And to win this struggle we have to win the battle of values as much as arms.""
Pedophile Muslims in Britain: "A leading Muslim figure has called for tougher guidelines to outlaw physical and sexual abuse against children at north west madrassas. According to a report published by the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, the problem of abuse is "widespread" and that thousands of children were under risk of being abused by their religious teachers. The report warns that the Muslim community could face the kind of child abuse claims that have scandalised the Roman Catholic churches. Co-author of the report Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui said it is time the Muslim community stopped "brushing the problem under the carpet." He said: "Up to 100,000 children are taught at 700 Islamic schools, or madrassas, of which almost a half use unlawful corporal punishment to discipline pupils. "Each year at least a dozen children are sexually abused by their teachers and Imams with very few cases ever being made public."
A pinhead tries to prick Mansfield: "The sneering review in the New York Times Book Review by a novelist called Walter Kirn of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness could have been anticipated, but its obtuseness - especially when viewed alongside the subtle and supple line of argument pursued by Professor Mansfield - is unusual even for the mainstream media culture which Mr Kirn represents. He compares the professor to Hans and Franz, the German body-builders portrayed by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon on "Saturday Night Live" back in the 1990s. "Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed," he writes, "partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words `girly' and `manly' - a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans?" So now are we to suppose that the prestigious New York Times regards it as a sufficient refutation of a serious work of political philosophy to say that it isn't "hip"? There could hardly be a better illustration of the dumbing down of the culture. Thought and argument count for nothing with the truly pinheaded Mr Kirn, only fashion, "cool" and, perhaps, celebrity, which sets the tone of what is fashionable and cool. He doesn't even know that calling an idea "out of date" is only a comment on its fashionability and not on its validity."
Keith Burgess Jackson has up an excellent quote from Steven Pinker which points out that sterotypes have considerable truth value. There has long been support for that in the academic psychology literature.
I hope most readers here have added "Tongue-Tied" to their regular tour of the internet. I have just put up a really good cartoon there. I was originally going to post there on weekends only but I seem to post there pretty often during the week now too. And on days when I am not posting, the posts that Scott puts up are in my view at least as good as mine.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here
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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)
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