Richard Lynn's Massaged IQ Data

Richard Lynn's Massaged IQ Data

Anyone who uses Richard Lynn's national IQ values should be aware that this data is "massaged"; either that, or Lynn doesn't know elementary arithmetic. Of course, I did not have time to go through all of the studies referenced by Lynn, so I manually checked his reported numbers from Buj (1981), a study on national European IQ levels, which I have personally read when writing my Greek and European IQ page.

The first column below are the original numbers from Buj (1981) taken from [1] and cross-checked against my own reading of the original paper. The second column are the numbers reported in IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Lynn rounds most numbers to the closest integer, but Italy's score is rounded down (0.8->0), Austria's score is rounded down (0.5->0), Ireland's score is "rounded" up (0.2->1), Norway's score is 1.8 lower than the real one, Greece's score is 2.4 lower than the one reported by Buj (1981). All in all, 5 errors in 19 numbers from a single study.


Holland 109.4 109 rounded
Germany 109.3 109 rounded
Poland 108.3 108 rounded
Sweden 105.8 106 rounded
Italy 103.8 103 truncated
Austria 103.5 103 truncated
Switzerland 102.8 103 rounded
Portugal 102.6 103 rounded
Norway 101.8 100 -1.8
Denmark 100.7 101 rounded
Hungary 100.5 101 rounded
Czechoslovakia 100.4 100 rounded
Spain 100.3 100 rounded
Belgium 99.7 100 rounded
Greece 99.4 97 -2.4
Ireland 99.2 100 +0.8
Finland 98.1 98 rounded
Bulgaria 96.3 96 rounded
France 96.1 96 rounded

[1] http://members.shaw.ca/delajara/NationalIQs.html

Buj, V., 1981, Average IQ values in various European countries, Personality and Individual Differences, 2, 168-169.

Celtic Origins on the Atlantic Facade of Europe

Celtic Origins on the Atlantic Facade of Europe

A new study re-evaluates mtDNA evidence, in conjunction with Y-chromosomal and autosomal DNA, to trace the origins of Celtic-speaking populations of Western Europe. The main conclusion is that while some Central European origin can't be ruled out using genetic data, current and former Celtic speakers seem to share a common ancestry with other non-Celtic populations of the Atlantic zone of Europe.

Am. J. Hum. Genet., 75:000, 2004

The Longue Durée of Genetic Ancestry: Multiple Genetic Marker Systems and Celtic Origins on the Atlantic Facade of Europe

Brian McEvoy et al.

Celtic languages are now spoken only on the Atlantic facade of Europe, mainly in Britain and Ireland, but were spoken more widely in western and central Europe until the collapse of the Roman Empire in the first millennium A.D. It has been common to couple archaeological evidence for the expansion of Iron Age elites in central Europe with the dispersal of these languages and of Celtic ethnicity and to posit a central European "homeland" for the Celtic peoples. More recently, however, archaeologists have questioned this "migrationist" view of Celtic ethnogenesis. The proposition of a central European ancestry should be testable by examining the distribution of genetic markers; however, although Y-chromosome patterns in Atlantic Europe show little evidence of central European influence, there has hitherto been insufficient data to confirm this by use of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Here, we present both new mtDNA data from Ireland and a novel analysis of a greatly enlarged European mtDNA database. We show that mtDNA lineages, when analyzed in sufficiently large numbers, display patterns significantly similar to a large fraction of both Y-chromosome and autosomal variation. These multiple genetic marker systems indicate a shared ancestry throughout the Atlantic zone, from northern Iberia to western Scandinavia, that dates back to the end of the last Ice Age.

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