What is an IQ map and can we trust them?

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Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast.

We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news and the world all around us.

And I'm Charlotte MacDonald.

Today we're going to be talking about a map that often does the rounds on social media.

It's quite an aesthetically pleasing map.

Lots of pretty colours.

But what it shows is pretty concerning.

Each colour represents a country's average IQ.

Lower scores go through the red-orange spectrum, whereas higher scores go from cool to deep blue.

Areas like Europe, North America and much of Asia are different shades of blue.

In contrast, the African continent looks like the different colours of a bonfire.

When you look into the numbers, you realise just how low some of these scores are purported to be.

A score of 100 is considered to be average.

But Equatorial Guinea has an average IQ score of 59, Nepal 42, and India, 82.

This seems crazy, but alarming data doesn't always mean wrong data.

We have well-developed IQ tests, so can the results ever really be that wrong?

Buckle up.

We're about to head into the upside down of statistical analysis.

Hi, my name is Karim.

I'm a biostatistics PhD student at Harvard University.

When he's not writing his thesis, Karim is very much online and often finds himself debunking various versions of that IQ map.

These all stem from one book, The IQ of Nations, first published in 2002.

And it was by this guy, Richard Lin and this other political scientist, Tatu van Hahnen.

Tatu van Hahnen was a professor of political science at the University of Tampera, Finland.

Richard Lin was a British psychologist who dubbed himself a scientific racist and was the editor for a well-known white supremacist magazine.

They were trying to look at the relationship between IQ and wealth.

In doing that, they needed IQ scores for all the countries.

We've all heard of IQ or intelligence quotient.

It's basically how well you do in a certain type of test that aims to put a score on how clever clever you are.

The higher the score, the brainier the brain.

At least, in theory.

If you get a score of 100, you're considered to have average intelligence, with the normal range being between 90 to 109.

If you look at the intelligence map based on the IQ of nations, Japan and Taiwan take the top spots with scores of 106.

This seems fair, both countries have good education systems and their students are regularly subjected to rigorous testing.

But then, it it all falls apart.

The numbers they have for the African countries are like ridiculous, you know, like in the 50s and 60s.

If this is correct and the average IQ level is 60, then these countries would have a significant amount of people whose IQ would be below 60.

Basically there's like a huge number of people that should be in the 30s and even 20s.

Meaning that if you judge it by the standards in the US or Europe, large swathes of people in the African continent would have profound developmental issues, which we know is not the case.

So, why are the numbers so odd?

They report 185 countries and of those 104, so more than half of them,

do not come directly from data.

That'll do it.

The authors found that IQ data simply didn't exist for many countries.

So they estimated what the likely IQ of one one country might be based on IQ data from their neighbouring countries.

However, the data from these countries was often taken from very small studies that weren't necessarily an accurate representation of the whole population.

They based the Equatorial Guinea numbers on some kids that were in a home for the developmentally disabled.

So these kids from Equatorial Guinea weren't even in their home country, they were in Spain.

But they weren't the only set of questionable questionable results.

So, the estimate for Somalia was based on a single sample of refugees living in a refugee camp in Kenya.

The estimate for Botswana is based on 104 kids living in South Africa who were tested in English, even though English wasn't their native language.

The estimate for Malawi is based on a sample of rural children, where 8% never attended school, 15% dropped out.

The estimate for Burkina Faso is based on on rural children.

The estimate for St.

Vincent and the Grenadines is based on a single sample of 174 rural children.

The Haitian estimate is mostly based on 133 rural six-year-olds.

The list goes on.

The estimate for Nepal is based on rural children and mothers who were suffering from malnutrition at the time.

So this study, they were studying malnutrition.

As part of the study of how malnutrition was affecting this population, they collected IQ data.

So the goal was to look and see how their IQs might have been reduced by malnutrition.

And these are the numbers that these guys use

in their analysis.

The thing is, the data used isn't always bad data in itself, but it doesn't show us what Lynn and some people who post the IQ map say it shows, which is that they believe some races are inherently more intelligent than others.

Instead, it tells us that severe malnutrition can cause cognitive issues, that children with developmental delays have developmental delays, and that if you ask people questions in a foreign language, they might not get the answers right.

So, do we actually have reliable data for this?

There's no way that you could have an IQ map of the world based on consistent data because that data genuinely doesn't exist.

My name's Angela Saini.

I'm a science journalist.

I teach science writing at MIT and I've written a book on race science called Superior.

There is no one standard test that everybody does universally, that you could then compare the data from different countries.

So the data does not exist.

Even if a universal IQ test did exist, the results are likely to have a lot to do with factors way outside of your genetics.

Education plays a huge role in who does well on IQ tests and who doesn't.

In fact, there has been research to show that children who are adopted into wealthier families, their IQ, their intelligence test scores go up.

So it's fraught on so many different levels.

You know, I really can't...

overemphasize just how problematic it is to try and pin down, number one, what is intelligence, how do you measure it, how do you make sure that the people you're measuring it in have exactly the same level of education and access to the same kind of ideas that that test is measuring for?

It's incredibly difficult.

So what about this theory that one race can be more intelligent than another?

Nobody's isolated a gene for intelligence, not least because this is a complex trait.

So if there are genes associated with intelligence, there are very many of them.

There are people who have certain talents, intellectual talents, musical talents, all kinds of things.

And sometimes there is a hereditary element to that, but that's not the same as talking about race.

What's more, intelligent parents don't necessarily equate to super intelligent children.

A child born to two exceptionally intelligent people

is likely to be slightly less intelligent than both of them because of regression to the mean.

So in statistical terms, you know, this idea, this is a very old idea that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, there's a bit of truth to that, but the bigger truth is that intelligence varies between individuals, not between groups.

So, if you see someone on the internet shouting about how much brighter one nation or one ethnicity is than another, proceed with caution.

The data probably doesn't say what they think it says.

That's all we have time for this week.

Thank you to Kareem Ka and Angela Saini.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please write in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk.

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