So where does the oddly precise “68” come from? Look to the right. Do you see the text “Ethiopia 63, Kenya 72”? If you read the “methodology” section of the book, you’ll find out that when the authors had no observations at all for a country, that didn’t stop them. They just declared the IQ of that country to be the average IQ of the studies of the often very few people subjected to psychometric tests in adjacent countries. Somalia is next to Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya. Djibouti and Yemen aren’t counted, because the authors don’t have access to any data for those nations. So they:
- took average IQ scores from the studies they dredged up in Ethiopia and Kenya,
- then assumed that the scores in Ethiopia and Kenya were representative,
- then assumed that “Somalia’s IQ score” was an average of Ethiopia and Kenya’s, but not Djibouti’s and Yemen’s, “IQ scores”
- all the while mistakenly forgetting countries don’t take IQ tests.
The authors literally just looked at Ethiopia’s “score” and Kenya’s “score” and picked a number in the middle and proclaimed that Somalia has an IQ score of 68. That’s their “methodology.”
It gets worse. What are Ethiopia’s “score” and Kenya’s “score” based on? As is typical for the studies used in the authors’ book, small numbers of scores derived from tests of odd and unrepresentative sets of people.
Let’s start with “Ethiopia’s IQ.” If you
look up the notes for yourself and follow the citations, you’ll find out that the Lynn and Vanhanen didn’t find any measurements of anyone’s IQ in Ethiopia, either. The best they managed was to gather 250 IQ scores from 14-to-15-year-old Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to Israel, living in Israel. The source was a 1991 study by Shlomo Kaniel and Shraga Fisherman’s, “Level of performance and distribution of errors in the Progressive Matrices test: A comparison of Ethiopian immigrant and native Israeli adolescents” in the International Journal of Psychology. These youths had been moved to Israel only one year before and in their lives in Ethiopia had been especially deprived, even compared to their fellow countrymen and women:
“In Ethiopia, Jews generally lived in small villages of 50-60 families, remote from urban centers…. Participation in formal elementary school was impeded by the long distances between home and school, travelled on foot. High school education necessitated either a move to the city, at great expense, or prohibitively difficult travel. Consequently, few Ethiopian Jews were able to receive formal education…. Prior to their exodus, most had never seen electricity, a telephone, or any technological instruments. In Israel, they must adjust to climatic differences, life in urban centers, a new language…” (p. 26)
But Lynn and Vanhanen take this astoundingly unusual small group of young, uprooted, uneducated youths not even living in Ethiopia, discover that their “IQ scores” are unsurprisingly low, and adopt that average score as the “Ethiopia’s IQ.”
What about the estimate for “Kenya’s IQ?” In a 2010 paper published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences, Jelte M. Wicherts , Conor V. Dolan, Jerry S. Carlson and Han L.J. van der Maa revealed that
Lynn had excluded a sample from his estimate for Kenya because the IQ in the sample was too high.
Biasing the scores from one country, importing scores for another country from a wildly unrepresentative group, and using both to charm up a completely fictitious average score for a third nation, Somalia. That’s the basis for Matthew’s decision to reject Somali immigrants to Lewiston. It’s wrong factually. And because it’s wrong factually, it’s wrong morally.
As I said, there’s just no convincing some people. When I pointed out that there were actually no observations of IQ in Somalia to back up Matthew’s claim, did Matthew change his mind. No. Instead, he simply refused to confront that fact.
Frankly, my hope in writing this isn’t for Matthew. My hope is that someone else reading this, someone whose mind isn’t quite so committed to a falsehood, will be willing to let that falsehood go.
