User:Captain Occam/outsideusa

According to Richard Lynn and others, racial differences in IQ scores are observed around the world. A commonly-cited review by Richard Lynn lists IQ scores for East Asians (105), Europeans (99), Inuit (91), Southeast Asians and Amerindians (87 each), Pacific Islanders (85), South Asians/North Africans (84), Non-Bushmen sub-Saharan Africans (67), Australian Aborigines (62) and Bushmen (54).

This data is generally considered less accurate than data from the United States and Europe, in part because of the inherent difficulty of comparing IQ scores between cultures. For example, several researchers have argued that cultural differences limit the appropriateness of standard IQ tests in non-industrialized communities. In the mid-1970s, for example, the Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria concluded that it was impossible to devise an IQ test to assess peasant communities in Russia because taxonomy was alien to their way of reasoning.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have also argued in IQ and the Wealth of Nations that national IQs resulting from racial differences are among the primary causes of differences in national income and other societal factors. Both this book and Lynn’s other research about international IQ differences have been sharply criticized by other authors such as Nicholas Mackintosh, who has accused Lynn of manipulation of data, and raised doubts about the reliability of his findings.  a:"Much labour has gone into this book. But I fear it is the sort of book that gives IQ testing a bad name. As a source of references, it will be useful to some. As a source of information, it should be treated with some suspicion. On the other hand, Lynn's preconceptions are so plain, and so pungently expressed, that many readers will be suspicious from the outset."

b:"A more egregious example is provided by his treatment of the Eyferth (1961) study of two groups of illegitimate children fathered by (mostly) American black and white servicemen and brought up by their (carefully matched) German mothers. Eyferth reported an average IQ of 96.5 for the mixed race children and of 97.2 for the whites. Lynn reduces the former number to 94 to compensate for use of an old test, and compares it, not with the score of the white sample, but with an average IQ of 100 for German children. He is thus able to conclude that the IQ of these mixed race children is half way between that of Americans and Africans. He derives the same conclusion from the Weinberg, Scarr, and Waldman (1992) transracial adoption study since, at the 10-year follow-up, the mixed race children had an average IQ of 94, mid-way between the 102 of the white children and the 89 of the black children. He omits to mention one of the more salient features of this follow-up, namely, that there had been substantial attrition in the white sample—with a loss of those children with lower IQ scores, resulting in an overestimate of the white group's IQ by some 6 points." Other researchers have agreed with Lynn about the correlation between national IQ scores and these social factors, but have disagreed with Lynn’s suggestion that differences national IQ directly cause differences in these factors, as well as his proposal that national IQs are determined primarily by the genetics of their populations.

Surveying the literature, Jelte Wicherts remarked that: "It is important to note that an observed IQ score does not necessarily equal a particular level of general intelligence or g (Bartholomew, 2004), as it is necessary to consider the issue of validity in interpreting an observed score as an indication of the position on a latent variable such as g. Several authors have questioned whether the IQ scores of Africans are valid and comparable to scores in western samples in terms of g ([Barnett and Williams, 2004], [Ervik, 2003], [Hunt and Carlson, 2007], [Hunt and Sternberg, 2006] and [Lane, 1994]). Some (e.g., Berry, 1974) reject the very possibility of obtaining a valid measure of g in Africa with western IQ tests, while others (e.g., [Herrnstein and Murray, 1994], [Lynn, 2006] and [Rushton and Jensen, 2005]) consider it relatively unproblematic. The psychometric issue of measurement invariance ([Mellenbergh, 1989] and [Millsap and Everson, 1993]) is crucial to the comparability of test scores across cultural groups in terms of latent variables, such as g. Alas, the number of studies addressing measurement invariance is small."