Friday, February 02, 2007

IQ vs Religiosity

Odd - it seems that the smarter one is the less likely one is to believe in God.

 

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The underlying link is amazing. I didn't suspect that somebody would be crass enough to rank nationalities by IQ. It smacked of racism to me...

By definition, the average IQ is about 100, which made me question these numbers. So I did some research, and for the most part, these IQ numbers are manufactured by Lynn and Vanhanen, based on national GDP.

It might be better to conclude that people living in poor countries consider themselves very religious.

There is a related wikipedia article here that gives better data...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

Even so, the older I get, the more I realize that any study using IQ is arbitrary and pointless.

In conclusion, the trend chart is unscientific, but cute.

helensotiriadis said...

anyone attending a mensa function will, at some point, question the validity of i.q. tests.

Michael Bains said...

Oh, they're valid alright. For "what" is the important bit that rarely gets mentioned.

They're valid for a fairly limited range of objectives involving Social Standards and functional educational abilities as determined by a certain group with particular aptitudes having higher weight in the scoring.

That's why the seeming misnomers such as "sports IQ" or "social IQ" aren't misnomers at all. It all depends what you're testing for.

You just need to take 'em with a big lick o' salt before deciding what the results mean.

lynn's daughter said...

IQ is best defined as the ability to learn and make sense of information, so this doesn't surprise me. I've long suspected this. I can't really have a reasonble conversation that gets beyond, "Because it just is. I don't need no evidence. It just is." with most religious people.

Lexcen said...

Ha, just as I suspected, there is a correlation between IQ and religion. Of course measuring an nations IQ is a bit suspect.