European IQs

From The Times of London, March 29, an article about the average IQs in various European nations, according to data from Richard Lynn, University of Ulster.

I'm reproducing the table from the article here, plus adding a column for population, using the World Factbook from cia.gov.

The IQ League

107  Germany        82.4 million
107  Netherlands    16.4 million
106  Poland         38.6 million
104  Sweden          9.0 million
102  Italy          58.1 million
101  Austria         8.2 million
101  Switzerland     7.5 million
100  British Isles  60.4 million
100  Norway          4.6 million
 99  Belgium        10.4 million
 99  Denmark         5.4 million
 99  Finland         5.2 million
 98  Czech Republic 10.2 million
 98  Hungary        10.0 million
 98  Spain          40.3 million
 97  Ireland         4.0 million
 96  Russia        143.4 million
 95  Greece         10.7 million
 94  France         60.7 million
 94  Bulgaria        7.5 million
 94  Romania        22.3 million
 90  Turkey         69.7 million
 89  Serbia         10.8 million

Of what use is this data? Anyone who has followed discussions on cosmicvariance.com and motls.blogspot.com about ex-Harvard President Lawrence Summers' remarks on why there are so few women physicists, knows that one side believes that it is all explained by IQ distributions. IQs are distributed in a bell curve; the average IQ (or math ability) of men is slightly higher then the average for women (the difference is five points or less) and men's IQ distribution has a larger variance than women. The result is that at the extremes (very high or very low IQ, 3 or more standard deviations from the mean) there are many more men than women.

Well, the standard deviation is typically 12-15 points, and so we see, e.g., that the German mean IQ is a half standard deviation greater than the British mean IQ. We could estimate the number of people of the various nationalities with IQs above, say, 150, and Germany, with its large population and its 107 mean IQ would dominate.

So, here is a testbed to check whether the idea supposed to explain difference in outcome between men and women in physics faculty jobs, applies elsewhere. E.g., Germany should probably easily dominate the Math Olympiad among the European nations.

The other amusing thought is that Professor Lubos Motl, who has a rather high measured IQ (158 or 165 or something, I don't remember, you can search his blog) and who is from the Czech Republic is probably unique there, but Motls are a dime a dozen in Germany.

PS: for instance, go to a normal distribution calculator like this one. For a mean (for Czechs) of 98, and standard deviation of 12, the fraction above 160 is 0.00000012 and the Czech Republic with 10.2 million people will have approximately one such person (more precisely, 1.224). In this example, 160 is 5.167 standard deviations above the Czech mean, but only 4.417 standard deviations above the German mean; Germany will have approx. 0.000005 * 82.4 million = 412 such people; on a per capita basis people with such IQs are 42 times more common in Germany than in the Czech Republic.

PPS: I should make it clear that I think IQ is mostly humbug.