It has always been a puzzle that Israelis tend to score BELOW the Western average on IQ. Israel is such a brilliant nation scientifically and technologically, that the finding almost seems to invalidate IQ tests. India presents a similar puzzle. Indians do very well wherever they migrate but on average seem to have low IQs back home in India.
AS is common, however, the problem would seem to arise from generalizations that are too sweeping and fail to look closely at the populations concerned. I will say a bit more about India below but what needs to be noted is that both nations are NOT ethnically homogeneous. High caste Indians are a lot different from “Dalits” and Israeli “Ashkenazim” (Jews of Northern European recent origin) are VERY different from Israelis of Middle Eastern origins.
And MOST Israelis are of Middle Eastern origins. They are mostly the Jews that were kicked out from Muslim lands after the foundation of modern Israel. Hitler got most of Europe’s Ashkenazim West of Moscow, leaving NYC as the great remaining Askenazi centre, and NYC is too comfortable for many Jews to leave.
And at least since the story of Ruth, Jews have never been very endogamous, and Yiddisher Mommas grieve over that to this day. One way or another, Jews have tended to become genetically assimilated into the population within which they live. So many Lithuanian Jews look just like Lithuanians and many Middle Eastern Jews look just like Arabs. Sadly, however, it is not only Arab looks that many Israelis share but also Arab IQ, which is low.
So yes. The Sephardim and Mizrachim of Israel are a bit dumb (though it is VERY incorrect to say so), but the Ashkenazim are very bright and it is they who make Israel an intellectual powerhouse.
Although there are similarities, India is not quite the same. The Northern and Southern Indians do appear to be at least partly of different racial origins and the Northerners seems to be descended in part from lighter-skinned conquerors from somewhere North of India. The conquerors were probably relatively few in number, however, as all Indians are pretty brown.
Indians generally are pretty keen endogamists, however, so the Brahmins are relatively fair of skin and are probably the most closely related to the original Northern invaders. And it is of course the Brahmins who run India. So it is the IQ of the Brahmins and other high castes that is crucial and I know of no studies that have separated out Indian IQ by caste.
And even in India some exogamy does happen. In India, you can generally tell how rich a man is not by his skin colour but by the skin colour of his wife. A rich brown Indian will generally have a fairer-skinned wife. So over the centuries capable Indians from all castes will have worked their way up the status tree and contributed higher IQs to the upper ranges of that tree.
But there is clearly a second influence at work in India: The rural effect. For various reasons a rural background tends to go with a lower IQ. You see that even in South Africa. The Afrikaners (whites of Dutch origin) have a lower average IQ than whites of British origin, even though there is no difference between the parent populations in Europe. And the Afrikaners have always been predominantly farmers.
So the current average IQ of the Indian population is undoubtedly held down by its overwhelmingly rural character. And when even Indians of a relatively low caste move elsewhere, that disadvantage seems to be lost and they prosper — as in Fiji or South Africa, for instance.
A canny critic might at this point say: “But what about China”? The Chinese are mostly rural and their average IQ is high. Again, however, the very word “China” is an oversimplification. There are many distinct nations within China with their own languages and traditions and a generally low opinion of other such linguistic groups. The picture-based written language of China is not so much an anachronism as a necessity. It’s the only way many Chinese can communicate with one another.
And from what I can gather most of the IQ testing has been done on Chinese from the coastal cities. Deep inland in rural China the IQ picture will probably be much different.
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
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17 users commented in " Israel, India, China and IQ "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIQ tests only if you can take a test well.
That is why immigrant groups tend to increase their IQ after a generation or two. The Jews and Irish had low IQ’s in 1910, so the eugenics folks wanted to pass laws limiting their offspring. Very amusing to read these arguments a hundred years later.
As for the Chinese:don’t believe anything that comes out of there, because they want only the best picture of their country…
Goes to show that IQ tests don’t mean much and are not a good predictor of success in life. And averages for nations in the billions like India and China don’t mean much. In fact they don’t mean much even for the sample group selected for the test. They do measure something though and I’ll leave it upto you to figure out what that is!
Read some history.
“There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts…the civilization I’m talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600… Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage”
[Carly Fiorina, ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 2001]
“For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. A.D 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem world offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages.”
[Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D (Harvard), American political theorist and historian, 1932]
“Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than in contemporary Europe;it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical books are now known to us only through Arabic copies. It invented windmills ,trigonometry, lateen sails and made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering and irrigation methods. In the middle-ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe rather from Europe to Islam. Only after the 1500′s did the net direction of flow begin to reverse.”
[Jared Diamond, UCLA sociologist and Author, 1997]
I am replying in response to Nancy Reyes. Though I don’t believe iq test can mean that much, i don’t agree that you comments on Chinese iq, simply because the tester is not from China and his testing methods are applied all over the world, e.g. the groups being tested, the areas being tested, etc, meaning test result could not be that biased…
But the fact is Israeli’s average IQ is 94 while Indians’ is around 81 ..
Has anyone read the book “Genius Explained” by Michael.J.A.Howe?Don’t buy into the IQ rubbish.And IQ can be increased,even in adulthood.The IQ experts sell the IQ concept like it’s some kind of bible,when it is NOT!
Just take a walk around Harvard or any of the Ivy leagues.
They are all East Asian (Chinese people, Korean, Japanese, etc…)
It’s their culture that heavily emphasize education from birth.
@LOL
Have you really walked around Harvard or Ivy Leagues? Till this year the maximum number of Students in US universities came from India. And ya…Indians are the largest group of Physicians in this country.
One more thing: Average household income of Indian family in the US is by far the highest. More than Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, or Whites.
@Deek,
have you walked around Harvard or Ivy League? I’m at one of the top Ivy, and biggest minorities are East Asians by far, the smartest korean, japanese and even chinese go back to their home countries after graduation nowadays, Indian, not so much, most stay here. That’s why east asian countries are way ahead of India, or any south asian countries, because their elite students go back and build their own countries unlike Indians. yeah, hence why indian family in the US make more, doesn’t really mean anything on the global basis.
i’ve traveled extensively to both indian and east asian countries for PHD research, like someone mentioned before… give east asian a land, they’ll get japan, taiwan, hong kong, singapre and increasingly china. give south asian a land, you get sri lanka, bangladesh, pakistan, india, there’s just no comparison. It’s truly first world vs. third world, the fact that indian in the US make more money doesn’t mean anything, because the smartest east asians go back to their home countries. And for the whites, the top 5% of US whites easily beat indians in US, since the indians here are probably the top percentile at India, it’s only fair when compare top vs. top, not top indian vs. entire white population.
America is in terminal decline.
14 million people are out of work in the USA. Another 6 million are working in temporary jobs unrelated to their primary skills
and experience.
These people are out of work because their IQs are too low in the range 75-80. That’s why. They should not have been hired in the
first place. They should be glad they had jobs doing nothing and those jobs lasted as long as they did.
@jonjayray
Think, not “suppose”, along the common sense and worldwide evidences, I may suggest?
On India IQ – the biggest lemon being sold to the world in recent time to accommodate and justify Indian mass immigration to the US, Canada, Australia and Europa.
“High Caste” Brahmins home towns in India, where most of world’s Brahmins live, are like Lagos of Sub-Sahara. No high IQers would live like that, not even by force. This is not due to oppressions of Communism like those in former East Germany, China or North Korea. India has been FREE since Day 1. What happened if they were self-proclaimed “high” IQ? It’s not poverty in those Brahamin home “cities”, but sheer filth and chaos they manage to create. In Comparison, North Koreans are more impoverished yet they keep thier cities clean. Despite being boycotted by the whole world in n-tech( China included) and all other tech, North Korean intellectual elites built N-bomb and it sdelivery system on their own without any help ; yet their counter parts in India, even with all the finance and academic connections to the Western world, could not build it on their own but depending almost entirely on a leaked and second-hand Canadian civil nuclear techonology….
Indian “Castes” made sense in the underlying IQ hierachy thousands of years ago in the very beginning before race-mixing, not any more. A recent research indicates that contrary to previous belief of North-south India divide ( North: lighter Cacausoid, South: darker Dravidian), modern Indians are in fact fairly HOMOGENOUS at sub-continental level(google these key words, I forget the name of the paper), hence their IQ likely follow suit as well. A simple test is to randomly pick an Indian in a crowded Indian street, you can’t tell he/she is Brahmins or other “high” castes or not by appearance as many Brahmins have very dark skins, yet one can tell with 100% arccuracy by appearance that he/she is, and they are all for that matter, of Indian/South Asian origin.
On China IQ: (“And from what I can gather most of the IQ testing has been done on Chinese from the coastal cities. Deep inland in rural China the IQ picture will probably be much different”)
If it is true, then it can’t explain these FACTS:
1. Singapore Chinese IQ > 105. Singapore Chinese are from Malaysian Chinese lot whose grand parents were by and large landless peasants from rural China (logically with below average IQ) who immigrated to the SE Asian several geenrations ago. it shows that rural China’s IQ could not be that different from the coastal areas.
2. The average IQ of overseas Chinese in the US and especially South Africa, Carribeans and Brazil showed similar to 105. Mind you their grand parents were again mostly disadvantaged rural landless Chinese in China who migrated overseas for being mainly hard labourers.
I agree with curent rural Chinese IQ is prehaps lower than that of the coatals, but that by much, a couple points?
Western Tibetan and Chinese Muslim regions and most southern region bordering Vietnam perhaps have lower IQ – more than a couple of points.
One thing not well known also statistically supports the view that there’s not much difference between interior rural and rich coastal China in innate IQ: China’s rigurous annual national university entrance exams, so called GaoKao, have shown that historically rural Chinese provinces outperform coastal Chinese provinces in key Maths and Science scores EVERY year. Richer metropolitans such as Beijing and Shanghai are not in the top 10 or 15 ranking list, not even once for the last 15 years.
@Nancy
I am a native Chinese. I appreciate your view to some extent. But the fact is that it’s the government who only show the best side. Most of us are opposed to the squandering in Beijing Olympics and Shanghai World Expo. The money should be saved to improve the living stardards of people struggling under the poverty line.
It’s a shame how much propaganda Europeans propagate on Upper caste ( particulalry Brahmin) vs rest of Indian particularly dalit IQ. I think It all follows from the Anglo Israelism which led English to relate themselves to such stupidity.
Dalit or the lowest castes are concentrated in Northwest and North and the gradient become smaller as one goes east or south (32% in Punjab and Haryana, 21% in Uttar Pradesh and so on). Indian lower and lowest castes are infact much more (fully caucasoid) while upper castes have a lot of Australoid blood. All the studies showing Europeans similar to upper castes are bunk, a pice of b******t.
In early days of English empire in India, Alexnader cunningham located some decendents of Assyrian Aryans in India. He called them pre Aryans. They are a dalit caste (untouchable tribe). The lowest castes of India are decendents of Scythians, Assyrians, Huns and Amorites exclusively who eneterd broadly for the sake of Buddhism and have very high R1a ancestory. It was only with rise of colonialism English decided to invent a new story which fails every test of genetics, linguists, archaelogy and anthropology. Regarding the decandence of these mighty once races into their status, it is natural course of time. They lost their status more than 2500 years ago everywhere.
This IQ propaganda is also invented by western psychologists and funded by Pioneer fund, which is a white supremacist group, Richard Lynn who wrote the book IQ and wealth of the nations has recieved money from Pioneer fund. The reason behind is simple to restrict immigration from South-Asia and encourage immigration from East Asia, because they consider them as favourable minority group. It has been proved that average IQ scores improve with the use of technology and literacy. More the nation is literate and use modern technology better the average IQ scores. The blacks in South Africa use to have lower average IQ scores during apartheid, but after the collapse of apartheid rule more blacks got opportunities to use modern technology and enrolled in Universities and hence are demonstrating better IQ scores.
The standard of living, quality of life, available of job opportunities, access to healthcare, better nutrition, and a feel good factor, all contribute to increase of average IQ level. A sheep farmer in Sub-Sahara Africa will not able to demonstrate a same IQ level as a black person working for New York stock, exchange, because of illiteracy and lack of understanding and use of modern technology.
In many cases IQ scores are manipulated and its not scientific at all, the western and east Asian countries are prosperous to certain degree and they lay emphasis on minimum basic education for all its citizens which includes familiarity with modern world and use of technology, hence they may demonstrate better IQ score in some circumstances.
I agree that IQ scores should not be taken as gospel. In reply to Speeder, suburban conditions in China can also easily compare to that of sub-Saharan Africa.
Secondly there is a clear distinction between north and south Indians. No way are they a HOMOGENOUS group. The Aryan invasion theory of India has been proven completely False. North Indians are native to the land but also they are a different race from indigenous south Indians!
Overall True Indian IQ can be assumed in the High 90′s, as they are commensurate with western populations where they reside outside India, if all inadequacy is accounted for. Only time will tell. People are a product of there environment. Look at poor whites.
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