1500 words
In my first article on this matter, I showed how Richard Lynn claims the average IQ in Italy is around “89-92” for Sicily and the South and around 103 for the North. I showed how he was wrong and what data he overlooked to fit his hypothesis. Lynn’s 2011 article IQs in Italy are higher in the north: A reply to Felice and Giugliano was a reply to Myth and reality: A response to Lynn on the determinants of Italy’s North–South imbalances. Felice and Giugliano brought up Lynn’s four main theses: a) the South’s “economic backwardness” in terms of economics ‘throughout history’; b) the evidence provided by Lynn wasn’t enough to ‘prove’ a cause of lower IQ for S. Italians; c) the evidence provided by Lynn wasn’t enough to show that S. Italians score lower than N. Italians; and d) the supposed ‘high rates of MENA admixture’ in S. Italians. I blew up all of these claims in the beginning of the year, more specifically I blew up up the claims about MENA admixture back in January. I’ll be going through Lynn’s 2010b article correcting any discrepancies. It’s worth noting that he still pushes the so-called ‘MENA admixture’ as being a substantial CAUSAL factor when there is NO evidence for this big of a ‘gap’ between the North and the South. The Lynn quotes will be from his 2010 paper linked above. I had also thought that ‘migrants’ from MENA countries could have contributed to the gap between the North and South, but since this isn’t the case for France then it shouldn’t be so for Italy. However, since Italy is a hub for these people when they first illegally enter Europe, they may stay and get counted as citizens and the children of these immigrants grow up and get accounted in the data. This is plausible, since a lot of ‘migrants’ may stay where they first get which is Southern Europe, mainly Sicily and Southern Italy.
We now present new data showing that IQs are higher in the north of Italy than in the south. In the previous study, data were presented for 12 Italian regions from the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 2006 study of the reading comprehension, mathematics and science performance of 15 year olds, regarded as measures of intelligence. We are now able to give similar data on the reading comprehension, mathematics and science performance of 15 year olds in 20 Italian regions obtained in the 2009 PISA study (OECD, 2010). These are given in Table 1. This shows, reading from left to right, the latitude of the Italian regions, the mean PISA scores for 12 regions for 2006 given in Lynn (2010a), the mean scores of 15 year olds on reading comprehension, mathematics and science understanding for the 20 Italian regions obtained in the 2009 PISA study, and the averages of the three 2009 PISA scores given because it provides a convenient summary of the scores on the three tests.
I already went through this in my previous article, but for clarity, I’ll go through this again.
Cornoldi, Giofrè, and Martini (2013) showed how there are problems inferring Italian IQ from the very PISA data that Lynn cites. There was a relevant decrease between the North and South. If the PISA test showed genetic proclivities between the North and South, why was there a relevant decrease in the three-year period? Because it is not an intelligence test, but a test of educational achievement. D’Amico et al (2011) conclude:
Our examination of intelligence test score differences between the north and south of Italy led to results that are very different from those reached by Lynn (2010a). Our results demonstrate that by using intelligence tests to assess differences in ability rather than using achievement scores as a proxy for intelligence, children from the south of Italy did not earn lower scores than those from the north of Italy. Rather, they were even higher in Raven’s CPM. However, we see no advantage in claiming that children in the south are “more intelligent” than children in the north, because these groups are different on a number of variables (e.g., environmental factors, educational influences, composition of the samples) that influence differences in test scores.
Either no difference or Southern Italians scored higher. When using purer measures of intelligence (Raven’s Progressive Matrices) so-called “differences” in “intelligence” disappear.
Lynn says:
It will be noted that the regional differences in both language and math ability increase with age. For example, in language ability the regional differences in the youngest children (P2) range between 1.6 and −3.8, a difference of 5.4, while the differences in the oldest children (2S) range between 3.6 and −4.4, a difference of 8.0. Similarly, in math ability the regional differences in the youngest children (P2) range between 0.8 and −1.0, a difference of 1.8, while the differences in the oldest children (2S) range between 4.3 and −5.4, a difference of 9.7. These age differences would be predicted from the thesis that the regional differences have a genetic basis, because the heritability of intelligence increases during childhood (Plomin, DeFries, & McClearn, 1980, p. 334).
On other measures of achievement, such as the INVALSI examinations, Southern Italians do not score lower, and in some cases may even score higher (Robinson, Saggino, and Tommasi (2011). Moreover, the N/S differences in ‘cognitive ability’ don’t exist at age 7, the IQ/income relationship didn’t exist in the past, and the MENA admixture in Southern Italians is minute (Daniel and Malanima, 2011). The so-called MENA admixture that Nordicists and Lynn like to say is the subject of my next point.
Lynn says:
Further data for the proportion of North African ancestry in the Italian regions are available in the frequency of the haplogroup E1b1b allele. This is a marker for North African ancestry, where it reaches frequencies above 50% and peaks at around 82% in Tunisia (Zalloua et al., 2008). The frequencies of the haplogroup xR1 and the E1b1b alleles are taken from Capelli et al. (2006), Capelli et al. (2007), Di Giacomo et al. (2003), Balaresque et al. (2010), Scozzari et al. (2001), and Semino et al. (2000). These data are given in columns 11 and 12 of Table 1 and the correlations between these and the other variables are given in Table 2.
As said and cited above, the so-called admixture from MENA populations in Southern Italians accounts for an extremely small fraction of the overall Southern Italian genome. The cause for lower achievement (“IQ” according to Lynn) in Southern Italians rests on this very pertinent point. And it’s wrong. Furthermore, and this is for Sicilians, the contribution of their genome by the Greeks is 37 percent, with the North African contribution being 6 percent. Daniel and Malanima (2011) ask ” Can the Greek heritage to the Western culture really be associated to a lower IQ?” The answer is, clearly, no. Moreover, a Central Italian province has the highest amount of MENA admixture, yet they have higher scores than Southern Italy. What does that tell you?
Richard Lynn’s Italian IQ data is garbage. Purer measures of intelligence such as Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices show a decrease in the “intelligence gap” and in some cases, Southern Italians score higher than Northern Italians. When using measures of “IQ” from PISA data, these so-called differences disappear. Lynn’s data he cites in his 2010a paper don’t control for socio-cultural differences and school quality. There is numerous data that suggests the school quality in Southern Italy is worse than that of the North; this difference in school quality then affects educational achievement. Since PISA is a test of educational achievement and not intelligence (D’Amico et al, 2011), what accounts for these differences in achievement in the various studies may (and in my opinion, does) account for the differences in educational achievement between Northern and Southern Italians. The measurements in various studies may be influenced by the larger between-schools variability that is present in the South (Cornoldi et al, 2010; Daniel and Malanima 2011).
Finally, some people may point to the GDP differences between North and South Italy as proof of genetic/intelligence differences between them. However, the Mafia accounts for around a 20 percent drop in GDP in Southern Italy. To say that any differences in GDP can be accounted for without first controlling for things like this is dishonest. The presence of Mafia in areas shows lower growth and a sharper increase in murders. Each time homicides rise, GDP falls between 16-20 percent (Pinolli 2012). The presence of the Mafia had a devastating effect on the economies in that area between the 70s and 00s.
In sum, PISA is garbage to infer intelligence from as they are tests of achievement and not intelligence. Other tests of achievement show a decrease in the gap and/or Southern Italians scoring higher. Moreover, no substantial genetic differences exist between the North and the South, falsifying Lynn’s thesis for the causality of the differences between the North and the South. The oft-cited GDP difference between Northern and Southern Italy can be accounted for by the presence of the Mafia. Whenever the murder rate rises (due to Mafia activity), the GDP decreases. None of these factors have been taken into account and they explain the difference between the North and the South. It is environmental in nature–not genetic. Lynn’s Italian IQ data is garbage and should not be cited. It’s just a Nordicist fantasy that Southern Italians score lower than Nothern Italians.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 
Rindermann and Thompson (THE COGNITIVE COMPETENCES OF IMMIGRANT AND NATIVE STUDENTS ACROSS THE WORLD: AN ANALYSIS OF GAPS, POSSIBLE CAUSES AND IMPACT, 2014) have the best collection of student assessment data, PISA and more, on both non-immigrants and immigrants in various countries.
With the usual Greenwich 100 for UK non-immigrants (this category does include some older immigrants in the old EU but that shouldn’t impact it too much), they find the equivalent of a 97.62 phenotypical IQ average for Italian natives, 95.65 for Greeks – South Italians can’t be *too* dissimilar. Europe ranges from 83.87 for Albania and low 90s for the rest of the non-Greek Balkans where environmental depression is a certainty (especially for Albania which even had iodine deficiencies up to very recently and which followed a very eccentric historical path compared to most of Europe) to 102.75 and 103.71 for Estonia and Finland – who knows exactly why, their extra Siberian ancestry compared to other Europeans doesn’t seem to lead to particularly high IQ in other northern Eurasian populations but maybe the practice of agriculture up north helped further boost IQ which already had a relatively high northern baseline.
Unfortunately they don’t analyze regional Italian data, and you can’t make a direct comparison to Lynn’s cited regional (and less careful) data, but it’s worth keeping in mind that all countries will show some regional differences, especially the population behemoths of Western Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany, France, UK) and not all of them go genetically northern -> southern, e.g. the UK and Germany where the genetically more southern regions perform better. ‘Genetically southern’ (genetically between more northern Iberia and more southern Tuscany and mainland Greece, in fact) Northern Italy also shows that ancestry on its own can’t explain everything since you wouldn’t have it performing better in the 2009 PISA than most of Northern Europe. Similarly, ‘genetically southern’ Greece outperforms the ‘genetically intermediate and north’ eastern area north of it up to and including the Ukraine. Norway and Iceland also don’t seem to perform that well compared to how ‘genetically northern’ they are.
That being said, I don’t doubt that intra-European variation in ancestry (farmer, steppe, native hunter-gatherer) might have something to do with variation in performance or that the small North African and Near Eastern ancestry in South Italy and Sicily might depress its score a bit like how the small Siberian ancestry in Finland and Estonia might raise theirs a bit. We could also argue that the small, less southern Albanian and Balkan Slavic ancestry in Greece also depressed its score of course – not all ‘more northern’ ancestry seems to boost IQ, to reiterate. More recent factors are also definitely at play here.
Now, onto the major disagreement: these student assessments do have very high correlation with past IQ studies so they’re still worth taking into account. Obviously, the most reliable data would come from well-constructed studies using IQ tests given to natives today, in 2016, and it’s worth keeping in mind that we still might be seeing environmental factors affecting some European countries. We can still look at all of these numbers as sort-of-reliable phenotypical estimates until good genotypic data is available.
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As an aside, while seemingly disagreeing with you politically on a lot (and also kinda disagreeing with you on this specific article), I’m glad you’re dispelling some bullshit coming both from the left and the race-realist right – for the latter, progressive evolution, Khazarian jews, Lynn and Rushton’s occasional bullshit and careless data collection for the former, general lack of up-to-date knowledge of the results of population genetics and frequently resorting to typology…all sorts of garbage.
I’m still not sure why you somewhat connect yourself (if that’s fair to say) with the alt-right cesspit, even if you’re some sort of race-realist libertarian.
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Thanks for the citation. I’ll read it this weekend and get back to you. It has data on immigrant and non-immigrant students? Cool.
Solid data. Southern Italians, as you say, can’t be too dissimilar compared to Greeks due to how much of the Southern Italian genome comes from Greece. Environmental factors play a huge part, like with iodine deficiencies as you’ve said along with parasites, nutrition and disease.
Agriculture actually decreased intelligence. Our brain size has been decreasing for about 20k years.
In one province in Central Italy, if I recall correctly Apulia, has the highest amount of MENA admixture in the country with higher test scores than the South, so something else is at play here. Lynn’s North/South cline doesn’t work within countries.
I doubt the small amount of admixture has that big of an effect on test scores. A more plausible explanation is the immediate environment.
I understand that. However, on actual IQ tests such as Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices, there either a small gap (smaller than Lynn’s claim using the PISA data) or Southern Italians slightly beat out Northern Italians. Wouldn’t you trust an actual test of intelligence over an achievement test?
Cornoldi, et al (2010)
Admittedly, the cohort was small, however, I hope to see more robust tests in the future with a bigger cohort. I know that there will turn out to be a non-statistically significant difference or there will be none at all.
People who push myths for their ideologies irks me. Evolution isn’t progress. Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Khazar. Lynn and Rushton were not infallible and got a lot wrong. Myths pushed by people who claim to be ‘realists’ when the new data is there for them to read for themselves gets on my nerves. If you claim to be a ‘realist’, then you should keep up on the newest genetic data. It seems most don’t.
I don’t let my politics drive me in my search for the truth and causes for racial and ethnic differences. I try to be as unbiased as possible (it’s impossible to not be biased; everyone is biased to some degree or another. It’s about minimizing your biases).
Why do you say it’s a cesspit?
If I am wrong and studies real IQ studies come out and Southern Italians prove to be substantially less intelligent than Northern Italians I will retract everything I’ve ever written about this and admit I was wrong. I doubt that’ll happen, though.
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Southern Germans are smarter than northern Germans. Southern Indians are also smarter. Just for the record…
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Exactly. Most of India’s development comes from the South. The North/South differences are valid without making shit up for between-country variances when environmental differences explain them way better than any nonexistent genetic differences or ethnic differences.
There is also more variance between Western and Eastern Germans and Northern and Southern Swedes. Different ethnic groups CONFIRMED!
Lynn is wrong here.
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Would you ever be interested in writing up your thoughts on India’s genetic IQ potential, as well as whatever may or may not be holding them back from achieving it? (I’ve pretty much given up on getting any answers from Razib Khan.)
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Sure I’ll throw something together next week.
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@Santoculto
Your opinion =/= fact.
I showed that school quality matters. Since these are achievement tests, one could safely reason that school quality has an effect on the questions on the tests.
The South is closing the gap:
I went through that in my previous article and provided sufficient evidence here. If I were shown to be wrong and on purer measures of intelligence, such as Raven’s, that Southern Italians still scored lower, I would retract my statements here and admit I was wrong. I’ve yet to come across any type of data like that and I doubt I will.
Follow my citations.
The level of immigration is nowhere near large enough to have an effect on France’s IQ, nutrition (environmental) and dysgenic effects explain it more.
I read it in a paper last night that cited Lynn (2006) as a source but I can’t find it at the moment; I’ll get back to you on that.
If one isn’t being taught what’s on the PISA, is that a fair measure of their achievement? Hence, why school quality matters. Low school quality means not being taught what’s on the eventual PISA.
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”Your opinion =/= fact.”
Some opinions can be
facts
possible facts
far to be factually correct
MENA or any other admixture don’t cause organically the reduction or increase in intelligence. Just like: i hurt myself, i feel pain, a causal relation. Any ”gene” that is correlated with any race is itself organically causal to the increase or reduction of ”intelligence”.
”I showed that school quality matters. Since these are achievement tests, one could safely reason that school quality has an effect on the questions on the tests.”
School quality = = student quality.
”The level of immigration is nowhere near large enough to have an effect on France’s IQ, nutrition (environmental) and dysgenic effects explain it more.”
Complete delirium on your part, France is the most demographically changed/ethnically changed country of the entire Europe. French de souche seems less than 70% of total metropolitan population, as well than caucasian population. The average frenchman in the XIX century is not exactly the same than the average frenchman today. Millions of poles, russians, portugueses, spaniards, italians, belgians and others have immigrated to France since XIX. France exhibit the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe since this belle epoque. France have ~10% of ”muslims” (MENA + subsaharian/sahel groups) without into account the non-whites with christian and or non-muslim background.
Bad schools are fundamentally bad because the avg behavior of their students, their motivation to study, their respect of teachers, etc…
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To start…
10% of french population have italian ancestry!!!
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Just because gene is ‘correlated’ to a race (races/ethnies have differing gene frequencies which then account for phenotypic changes) doesn’t mean that any low amount of admixture will negatively affect the intelligence of that group.
Do you mean “School quality does not equal school quality”?
This has been addressed:
Prove that the sample had other ethnies and wasn’t majority French.
Actually, Germany has the lowest fertility rate at 1.3, the same as Japan.
The cause for the decline in IQ is slightly lower quality nutrition (a lack of the relevant nutrients that affect cognition and brain size) and the main reason, dysgenics.
Is this always the case? Everywhere you look? Can school quality not be looked at when talking about differences in achievement within countries?
Daniele and Malanima (2011)
Cornoldi, et al (2010)
Is it always the case that the average behavior of students is the reason for school quality, or do other factors come in to play when discussing the quality and quantity of education?
The French are a Mediterranean people.
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For what it’s worth, Rindermann and Thompson calculate an estimated 1.2 decrease in French phenotypical IQ (though, again, based on student assessments) due to immigration (natives 99.19, immigrants 92.89 – average 97.99). This is up to second-generation so it captures the vast majority of immigrants, though not all.
This isn’t too different from the other old EU (pre-2000s expansion) countries with estimated decreases of 0.5 to 1.5 overall – smallest decrease in Italy for 0.52, largest in Germany for 1.59. Let’s keep in mind that this decrease is at its largest possible as immigrants of any background do better in the second generation in student assessments, which R&T also find. Hypothetically, if you completely halted immigration, the current decrease would retract a bit.
Immigration does seem to have caused a small decrease in performance and the situation in the long run with differential fertility rates can be a problem, but *right now* it isn’t the post-apocalypse some people on the internet are imagining.
PS: They also find that Australian immigrants perform better than the natives by a bit. This is unsurprising considering they attract skilled Europeans and higher-mean East Asians.
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Woodley of Menie and Dunkel (2015) say:
Replacement migration in France involving populations exhibiting lower means of IQ and higher rates of total fertility, such as Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and Roma (Čvorić, 2014 and Lynn and Vanhanen, 2012) may be increasing the rate of secular losses at the level of g, consistent with speculations advanced in Dutton and Lynn (2015), however the additional loss in g due to this process is anticipated to be very small. Based on a simulation, Nyborg (2012) estimates that in Denmark, replacement migration may be reducing heritable g by .28 points per decade, which would increase the overall loss in g to 1.51 points per decade ( Woodley of Menie, 2015), this still being only 37.75% of the loss observed in the French cohort.
Very, very small. It’s not as big as people are making it out to be. They just make assumptions saying “oh there are a lot of immigrants so the IQ is dropping”. Too bad that’s not what analyses say.
Exactly. People assume that IQs and the like are dropping because their feelings tell them so. But when looking at the data the ‘drop’ is negligible to meaningless. Immigrants are selected for through super-selection, the best of the best leaving (or having the ability to leave). Have a link to the paper? Do they find that the children of immigrants score better than the parents or find the reverse?
Extremely small to nonexistent. I wrote about France last month. Moreover, fertility rates never remain constant. So to predict birth rates 50 years into the future is retarded. It isn’t a post-apocalyptic scenario–yet–but most people on the internet think with their feelings on the matter and not with the hard data (which is funny. Something they get on leftists for–the feelz over realz).
Like Aborigines?
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Lol, Australian natives as in third-generation and older immigrants of course. It’s a shame the actual Australian natives perform lower than anyone else, even the damn Europeans who took over, but nature sucks like that.
As for the Rindermann paper, I don’t have access to it right now to post exact data but the immigrant children outperformed their parents on student assessments. In Europe, they still didn’t reach native levels while in other countries like Qatar, even first-generation immigrants outperformed the natives for well-known reasons.
I agree with you about demographic predictions too; you’d have to use the more pessimistic scenaria to really be alarmed. If Europe controls immigration better and makes a concerted effort to vet actual refugees and reject economic immigrants, there’s no problem.
From a white nativist perspective, the USA is in a much worse position if anything.
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If you get access to the paper, please post it and or the data. Do you know the name of the paper?
The immigrant children scoring better than their parents can be chalked up to nutrition as well as receiving better schooling.
Agreed. Though it doesn’t look too good at the moment, the alarmism is just that–alarmism. It doesn’t bode well for the future, but at the moment it’s not as bad as people make it out to be–mostly in regards to the IQ drop (despite what the DailyStormer says on IQ and immigration, for France for instance, which I have rebutted here). People should actually read and understand the papers they cite, because that article is hilariously wrong.
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I should also mention that they did find a smaller set of countries where second-generation immigrants did better than first-generation ones but they hypothesize that this might be due to different %s in ethnic origins of the two groups.
I still think overall there is some good support for immigrants closing the gap – but only *partly* and never fully as we’d already predict based on what we know about heritability.
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“where second-generation immigrants did better”
Did WORSE, that is.
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Immigrants who emigrate to the West have the advantage of better schooling as well as better nutrition. I’m going to write, eventually, on nutrition deficits in MENA countries and what type of gains in IQ and the like should be expected when emigration to the West occurs.
Science Daily reported back in May that refugee children had similar academic success compared to other children when adequately supported, despite having behavioral and emotional problems (the cause of which is inbreeding) (the abstract of the paper is here). It’s worth noting that Razib Khan says in his article Middle Eastern Populations Have Higher Recessive Disease Load:
It’s kind of a coin-flip on whether or not second- and third-generations will do better. They do have the advantages of better schooling and better nutrition, so more than likely they would do better than their parents.
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WE WUZ KANGZ: The Godfather edition
“If I am wrong and studies real IQ studies come out and Southern Italians prove to be substantially less intelligent than Northern Italians I will retract everything I’ve ever written about this and admit I was wrong. I doubt that’ll happen, though.”
Not sure why I’m posting this since I’m sure you’ve already been told this and keep denying it because of Lynn’s minor irrelevant amateur mistakes on unrelated work, but..
Sicilians, N = 5370, 18 year olds, IQ test is Cattell Culture Fair test, average IQ was 90.
Pace, F., & Sprini, G. (1998). A proposito della “fairness” del Culture Fair di
Cattell. Bollettino di Psicologia Applicata, 227, 77−85.
These and the one above are all published IQ studies of Italy:
Italy(?) 15 to 80 | N = 138 | CPM | IQ: 76
Basso (1987) 1 Basso, A., Capitani, E., & Laiacona, M. (1987). Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices: normative values on 305 adult normal controls. Functional Neurology, 2, 189-194.
Italy(Nationwide) | 6 to 11 | N = 1,384 | CPM | IQ: 95
Belacchi et al. (2008) 1 Belacchi, C., Scalisi, T. G., Cannoni, E., & Cornoldi, C. (2008). Analisi della distribuzione descrittiva ai punteggi CPM del campione normativo, per fascia di età e per tipo di somministrazione (N = 4678). Firenze: Giunti O.S. Organizzaazioni Speciali.
Italy(Rome) | Adults | N = 1,380 | CF | IQ: 102
Buj (1981) 1 Buj, V. (1981). Average IQ values in various European countries. Personality and Individual Differences, 2, 168-169.
Italy(Genoa) | 6 to 11 | N = 700 | CPM | IQ: 95
Galeazzi et al. (1979) Galeazzi, A., Castelli, G., & Saccomani, M. V. (1979). Contributo alla taratura delle PM47 per soggetti in eta dai 4 agli 11 anni. Bolletino di Psicologia Applicata, 152, 79-91.
Italy(Pisa) | 6 to 11 | N = 459 | CPM | IQ: 99
Prunetti et al. (1985) 1 Prunetti, C. (1985). Dati normativi del test P.M. 47 Coloured su un campione di bambini italiani. Bolletino di Psicologia Applicata, 176, 27-35.
Italy(Pisa) | 7 to 11 | N = 500 | CPM | IQ: 103
Prunetti et al. (1996) Prunetti, C., Fenu, A., Freschi, G., & Rota, S. (1996). Aggiornamento della standardizzazione italiana del test delle Matrici Progressive Colorate del Raven. Bolletino di Psicologia Applicata, 217, 51-57.
Italy(Florence) | 11 to 16 | N = 2,432 | SPM | IQ: 103
Tesi & Young (1962) Tesi, G., & Young, B. H. (1962). A standardisation of Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Archive di Psicologia Neurologia e Psichiatrica, 5, 455-464.
Italy(?) | 5 to 17 | N = 809 | CAS | IQ: 98
Naglieri et al. (2013) Naglieri, J. A., Taddei, S., & Williams, K. M. (2013). Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis of U.S. and Italian children’s performance on the PASS theory of intelligence as measured by the Cognitive Assessment System. Psychological Assessment, 23, 157-166.
Only one study on southern Italians, but the 5 studies on Greece show the same thing.
Tbh, I even doubt the northern Italian numbers given northern Italy’s economy is actually highly overrated, University degree rates(https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/nuts2-tertiary-education.jpg) are dismal compared to the rest of Europe, and the high level of debt/corruption. When looking at GDP per capita you want to probably include government debt and government spending as well, doing so brings Spain above northern Italy and countries like Estonia/Czech Republic pretty close. The 99 for Pisa seems to be the most likely number for the north, ignoring the old 1962 study and the adult study from the capital which is more likely to have a selected sample(especially since it’s from the capital) rather than kids.
At the end of the day, all pro-southern Italian arguments are the same weak, unresearched arguments used for negro/arab, what have you equality and don’t stand to the simple test of observation, stereotypes(most if not all stereotypes are true).
The southern European supremacist or egalitarian cannot be a white nationalist as theoretically, the influx of Syrians and other non-SSA admixed MENA groups should provide a boost in IQ from the original creators of human civilization, provided they cease inbreeding, an easy cultural task to achieve.
Not going to respond to your outlandish claims about insignificant MENA admixture in southern Europeans(hint: autosomal DNA and PCA plots, not irrelevant haplogroups).
Of course, none of this matters as long as we all work for separate nationalism between European groups, after all, you wouldn’t want us snow niggers defiling your Med goddesses now would you?
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I see you didn’t read:
Both groups obtained mean scores very close to 50th percentile. Based on these norms, the mean scores obtained by Northern Italian children correspond approximately to percentiles: 53, 51, 53, 54, 57 and those of Southern Italian children to percentiles: 54, 45,50, 48, and 50 which can be roughly estimated as respectively mean IQs of 101, 101, 101, 102 and 103 for Northern Italian children and of 102, 98, 100, 99, 100 for Southern Italian children.
The mean Southern Italian children IQ is not particularly low: A reply to R. Lynn (2010)
I care about science, not politics.
PISA is garbage to infer IQ from.
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and you likely read Lynn’s responses(http://www.phazepdf.org/238614100/Iq-differences-between-the-north-and-south-of-italy-a-reply-to-beraldo-and-cornoldi-belacchi-giofre-martini-and-tressoldi-pdf/) yet choose to ignore them(fyi, Belacchi et al. don’t even dispute Lynn’s adjustments on his study, Belacchi’s next reply went onto, like you, foolishly doubting the genetic distance between North and South Italians and more ranting about PISA).
The adjusted IQ of Belacchi’s 2008 study is 95, it is not in the hundreds, and of course, you didn’t address the actual largest sample study done on Sicilians, giving them an IQ of 90. There’s also the online study which you reject as it was done online, but the issue with online IQ tests is most(not all, some of the actual IQ test makers make theirs available online) are fake, and heavily inflated scores, not low scores. The fact that the scores just happen to correlate so well with other studies, PISA and the stereotype that Southern Italians do indeed have lower IQs, it’s hard to ignore. China is another place where nationwide online tests were done and the results correlated well. Then of course, you still have to answer for Greece’s numbers(largely the same people as southern Italians, ask if you want the 5 studies, one of which was Georgas et al. 2003 where he studied children of 7 different nations during the same period and got 92 for Greece, and 101, 100, 99, 99, 98, 95 for the Netherlands, Korea, Sweden, Germany, France, Slovenia respectively.
If that isn’t enough non-PISA data for you to admit it and stop being so biased, I don’t know what is.
You cannot claim to care about science and then proceed to say genetic differences between north and south Italians are small or south Italians don’t have significant MENA admixture(EVEN if you counted early European farmers as a pure European population, they STILL have significant extra MENA admixture, whether that was from the bronze age or Roman immigration like the fully Levantine genome found in Roman Britain). Also, if you’ve posted about Davide Piffer’s GWAS IQ alleles on this really otherwise impressive blog(other than the bias and ignorance on population genetics/relevance of haplogroups), you might want to take them down as they show Tuscans a significant notch down below other Europeans.
You have an 88 beside your e-mail and have written about politics before, I’m sure you have no political agenda with all this.
Stop posting bullshit from autistville Italicroots or whatever and post actual published genetic studies. Ask people into genetics like Razib Khan or David Reich if there’s barely any genetic difference between north and south Italians. This all reminds me of the “but we all share 99.9% of our dna” bullshit.
The genetic distance between north(not Tuscans) and south Italians(Sicilians anyway) is about that of the distance between north Italians and the English.
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I concede there will be a few points, if there is any difference at all. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that SES inequality dictates differences as well. The difference is nowhere close to 1 SD though.
Also, I see you didn’t read this paper. See Table 1 of D’Amico et al (2010: 130). Also:
Naglieri et al. (submitted for publication) studied the differences between the psychometric qualities of the CAS for the Italian and US standardization samples. Although the goal of that study was not to make regional comparisons, they did report that there were no significant differences (F(1, 806)= 2.19, p= .11) between the average CASItalian Full Scale standard scores (set at a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15) for students from the northern (M= 100.5; SD= 13.2), central (M= 101.2; SD= 11.9), and southern (M= 103.1; SD= 11.6) regions of Italy. The mean standard scores for the students in the north were only slightly lower than the mean for those in the south (effect size= .21). These results suggest that a test of intelligence that measures basic neuropsychological processes, and does not include academically laden verbal and quantitative tests, yields small differences between the regional groups. These findings also amplify the importance of measuring intelligence directly when comparing groups and argue against using reading, math and science test scores as “proxies for Intelligence” (Lynn, 2010a)
When accounting for territorial differences the N/S divide in math PISA scores, 75 percent of the difference comes down to resource differences while the remainder comes down to school effectiveness {Bratti et al 2007)
No thanks. I do not accept online ‘IQ tests’.
See this by Dienekes on Greek IQ.
Nope. I look at politics through an evolutionary lens, thinking about why people form into groups and it’s of course rooted in the brain. We want to congregate with like others with similar genes. That is interesting to me. What I write about has nothing to do with politics and any politics I do write about is looked at without bias. My ‘agenda’ is to get the truth out about racial differences. I want to understand why we are the way we are and how and why we evolved to be this way. Looking at evoution, evolutoinary psychology, and political psychology and combining it with HBD will have us come to a better understanding of human nature.
That is true, irregardless of your feelings on the matter. I admit low amounts of admixture from MENA countries, and it’s lower than that for Europe.
The PCA plot shows how related each European ethny is to each of the three ancient ancestral populations that make up modern-day Europeans are.
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By the way, since you were so interested to see what Razib thought about this, here it is:
A commenter said to him on his article Italy, from Top to Boot:
Seems to explain why Southern Italy is notoriously kin based and northern Italy drives most of its progress. The North African element in particular would explain the mafia nicely.
To which he responded:
the genetic distance is modest. so you must be talking about culture.
Italy, from Top to Boot
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