IQ

I was reading an article in Newsweek this evening on IQ tests.  The article was about a study that showed that IQ’s are lower in countries with rampant disease and poverty and higher in countries that are healthier and richer.  The study showed that IQ’s are impacted by children growing up with disease and this happens more in countries that are warmer as opposed to countries in cooler climates.

All I could think of when I read the article was “Well, DUH!!”.  Of course a person’s IQ would be impacted by poverty and disease.  People who suffer from poverty and sicknesses don’t have the same educational advantages with which the healthier and wealthier people have been blessed. This seems blatantly obvious to me.

Then, there is the fact that I think that IQ tests are generally culturally and ethnically biased.  A test developed by western civilization cannot measure the intelligence of everyone in the world.  Different countries have different educational needs and questions that are relevant to the residents of United States wouldn’t be relevant to people living in the middle of the rainforests in the Amazon.

Since a tribe living in the jungles of the Amazon doesn’t know how to read or have any knowledge of western civilization, does that make them less intelligent?  They have knowledge of how to build fires, how to forage for food, how to kill for food, how to build shelters, etc. about which the average supposed high IQ person would be clueless.  If you take a member of that tribe and tried to have them take an IQ test, they would fail.  But if you take a person who claims to have an IQ in the top 1% of the world’s population and drop them in the middle of the rainforest, would they be able to make fire, find food and survive or would they be clueless on what to do and eventually die of exposure or hunger?

I find it absurd to think that we can say someone has an IQ that places him or her in the top 1% of the world when IQ tests cannot measure the intelligence of everyone in the world.  It is possible to say that someone’s IQ is high for people who have taken IQ tests.  That would be an accurate statement.  But unless we are going to measure the intelligence, in an unbiased manner, of everyone in the world, we need to be careful about quantifying something that is essentially an arbitrary figure (how is that for a fancy sentence?).

The reason this can be a problem is that people can be given low self-esteem if they are told they have a low IQ or are in the bottom third of the population when it comes to intelligence.  I knew a boy once who had been told so many times that he had ADHD and wasn’t very bright that it came to define him.  He didn’t feel he needed to try too hard or didn’t expect too much of himself because he had been told that he wouldn’t be able to do well in school.  I think his parents and the school system undersold him.  Just because he fell into the below average range when it came to intelligence didn’t mean that he was lacking in talent.  He should have been encouraged to find the talent that would define him.  He might have been brilliant at mechanics or art or cooking.  But, instead, he was told to not expect too much of himself.  Last I heard anything about him was that he committed robbery and was sent to prison when he was about 19 or 20. He was defined by other people’s definitions and they probably all wondered what went wrong with him when it was those people who caused him to be that way.

I guess my point is to not let things like IQ define who we are in any way, shape or form.  We all have a talent or skill or ability that makes us shine as a person.  It may be discovered when we are very young, like it did for Mozart, or it make come out when we are really old, like Grandma Moses who didn’t start painting until her 70’s.  Every person should be encouraged to find out what best defines who they are and grow into that person.

Also, spending money on a study where the results are blatantly obvious is a waste of resources.  If I was in charge of handing out grants for studies and someone came to me with the proposal of studying the IQ’s of people in poor, unhealthy countries vs. rich, healthy countries, I would tell them that the answer is obvious and they should be better off spending their time studying how to make countries that are poor and unhealthy to be healthier and wealthier.  Of course if they didn’t study this, it would mean that I wouldn’t go off on a tangent on the inaccuracies of IQ tests.  Although I may have written about this eventually because it is a subject that has bothered me for years.  It has bugged and puzzled me the way same way that the argument of nature vs. nurture puzzles me.  But that will be a subject for another day.