14 DAY TRIAL // The most intelligent people in Europe are the Germans, the Dutch, the Polish, the Swedish and the Italians. Professor Richard Lynn and his colleagues from Northern Ireland's University of Ulster have conducted an IQ survey and have discovered relatively significant regional differences in Europe.
The average intelligence in countries like Germany and Holland is 107, while in countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Serbia it is only 89. The supposed average intelligence quotient is 100. Spanish and French are also beneath this level, with an average intelligence of 98 and 94.
Professor Richard Lynn caused quite a stir last year when he claimed that on average men are 5 IQ points more intelligent than women. The way IQ is defined, a difference of 20 points between A and B, where B has a score closer to the average, means that people having the same intelligence as A are twice more scarce in the population than people having the same intelligence as B. Thus, the difference between the average Dutch and the average Bulgarian seems quite significant.
All the controversies surrounding such uses of IQ tests start from the fact that IQ tests do not test solely genetically determined qualities - the results are also influenced by socio-cultural factors. Thus, this result could be explained by saying that south-eastern Europeans had lower scores simply because they are not so well accustomed with western culture.
However, professor Richard Lynn notes that the average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is also larger (1,320cc) than in southeast Europe (1,312cc). According to his interpretation, populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south.
Furthermore, he ascribes the differences between British and French IQ levels to the results of military conflict. He believes there exists an "unrecognised law of history" that "the side with the higher IQ normally wins, unless they are hugely outnumbered, as Germany was after 1942." This type of argument was used in the past to explain why Japanese people supposedly have a higher average intelligence than Europeans or Americans - the wars in Japan's history presumably acted as natural selection and the more intelligent individuals managed to survive and reproduce more often than the less intelligent, thus leaving behind a more and more intelligent population.
