The relationship between geography and IQ

[George S]

 

[Valjean]

So what's the relationship, and where did this map come from? Looks more political than geographical.
Link?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Where does this data come from?

 

[rousseau]

Whenever I see maps like this I'm usually just reminded that when I take IQ tests they usually spit out a number 40 points above the average.

You'd think that'd be a good thing, but I'm really just an outlier in fucking everything.

 

[George S]

Where does this data come from?

http://memolition.com/2014/02/27/wh...ople-on-earth-world-map-of-average-iq-scores/

See list, not map, at: https://iq-research.org/en/page/average-iq-by-country US is beyond the 26th country name.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Which is more of a problem, since the test was probably formulated in the US.

The map pretty much illustrates that intelligence is manifest in different ways in those areas of the globe that aren't often exposed to a western education. I'm assuming that explains the downwards skew.

 

[rousseau]

Which is more of a problem, since the test was probably formulated in the US.

The map pretty much illustrates that intelligence is manifest in different ways in those areas of the globe that aren't often exposed to a western education. I'm assuming that explains the downwards skew.

Yea. The skew itself discredits the validity of IQ tests. If it accurately measured.. well.. whatever it's measuring in the first place, then you would expect a much, much smaller variance. But if you're comparing a country filled with highly skilled workers, to a country with high illiteracy, how can you isolate 'intelligence' as a variable?

The de facto result is showing where people are best and least educated, although in another light it makes a pretty good case that the 'norm' hovers in and around 100.

 

[ronburgundy]

Which is more of a problem, since the test was probably formulated in the US.

The map pretty much illustrates that intelligence is manifest in different ways in those areas of the globe that aren't often exposed to a western education. I'm assuming that explains the downwards skew.

Yea. The skew itself discredits the validity of IQ tests. If it accurately measured.. well.. whatever it's measuring in the first place, then you would expect a much, much smaller variance. But if you're comparing a country filled with highly skilled workers, to a country with high illiteracy, how can you isolate 'intelligence' as a variable?

Let me preface by saying that I agree that it is highly likely that much of the between region variance in that map is due to education.

That said, there is no need to isolate "intelligence" from "education". Education is a perfectly plausible causal impact on intelligence, even if intelligence reflects a set fundamental cognitive skills that generally impact learning and problem solving, and is remains stable across the lifespan after a stage of early development.
The non-straw man conception of general intelligence that is studied and accepted as scientifically useful by most cognitive scientists allows for influence from education, and other environmental factor from nutrition to lead exposure, especially in early childhood.

Also, why would you expect a "much smaller variance" if the test were valid? It should vary as much as the thing it is measuring varies, given its level of sensitivity to small variations. Nothing about the amount of observed variance speaks to its validity.
The skew of the variance is a separate issue and does potentially speak to its validity, but maybe not. Not all variables are normally distributed. In fact, evolution often creates non-normally distributed traits due to different selection pressures on different subsets. Also, the map doesn't even show a non-normal distribution at the aggregate level, only that different levels of the distribution are non-randomly dispersed by location, which no reasonable theory of intelligence would predict it should be, given that it would impact how, where, and who migrates, and differential survival of different intelligence levels depending upon geographic location and migratory trajectory to wind up there.

The result that would most undermine the validity of IQ would be if, against all odds, something tied to reasoning and general problem solving wound up randomly distributed across all geographic areas.

The actual specific pattern of how IQ is distributed may well be more in line with effects of education, but neither the variance, its skew, nor it being non-randomly distributed are problematic for its validity, and the latter supports it. Also, if education winds up being the causal factor for the geographic pattern rather than any genetic variance that isn't even a problem for the validity of IQ or the concept of general intelligence. It would only mean that the kind of major educational differences that exist between cultures with centuries of pervasive differences are sufficient to impact whatever the test measures. Only a strawman theory of 100% genetic determinism would be invalidated by that. Education impacts very fundamental cognitive skills that in turn impact lifelong learning across many contexts, some of which are also impacted by genetic factors (which vary more within than between geographic groups). IQ is only claimed to measure such general cognitive skills, so if education is among the factors that influence them, then there is no problem. Also, education can plausibly have massive impact early in life that cannot be undone by later experiences. Thus, even the notion that these skill get set early then remain stable constraints is left untouched by the potential impact of education on cross cultural aggregate differences.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I don't know the source of the data of the map in the OP, but it seems roughly accurate. I made my own map of national IQ data collected by Richard Lynn, as follows:

It is useful for providing about half of the total explanation of economic inequality among nations. I calculated a 0.5 correlation in MATLAB between average IQ and GDP per capita, per the following image.

It is a powerful explanation, as IQ is mostly heritable within groups per identical twin studies, IQ variations have a moderate relationship to variations of economic productivity, and allele frequencies vary significantly among the races. ronburgundy, IQ is known to have a causal effect on the level of education, but the claim that education increases IQ is still not established. It is only speculation, though it should not be ignored.

Here is a table of my source data from Richard Lynn and the CIA World Factbook, sorted from low IQ to high.

Nation IQ GDP-per-capita
Malawi 60 900
SriLanka 62 11,000
Cameroon 64 2300
CentralAfricanRepublic 64 800
CongoBrazzavillle 64 4600
EquatorialGuinea 64 19300
Gambia 64 2100
Mozambique 64 1100
SierraLeone 64 800
CongoZaire 65 300
Eritrea 66 700
Zimbabwe 66 500
Dominica 67 13600
Guinea 67 1100
Mali 68 1300
Ethiopia 69 1100
Nigeria 69 2600
Botswana 71 16300
Côted'Ivoire 71 1600
Ghana 71 3100
Jamaica 71 9000
StLucia 71 12900
Zambia 71 1600
Kenya 72 1700
Namibia 72 7300
SouthAfrica 72 11000
Tanzania 72 1500
Uganda 73 1300
Senegal 74 1900
Rwanda 76 1300
StVincent 77 11700
Nepal 78 1300
SaudiArabia 78 24000
Guatemala 79 5000
SriLanka 79 5600
Barbados 80 23600
Bahrain 81 27300
Bangladesh 81 1700
Honduras 81 4300
MarianaIslands 81 12500
DominicanRepublic 82 9300
India 82 3700
Lebanon 82 15600
Madagascar 82 900
Egypt 83 6500
Libya 83 14100
Oman 83 26200
PapuaNewGuinea 83 2500
Qatar 83 102700
Syria 83 5100
UnitedArabEmirates 83 48500
Colombia 84 10100
Iran 84 12200
MarshallIslands 84 2500
Morocco 84 5100
Pakistan 84 2800
Paraguay 84 5500
PuertoRico 84 16300
Tunisia 84 9500
Vanuatu 84 4900
Cuba 85 9900
Fiji 85 4600
Jordan 85 5900
NewCaledonia 85 15000
Peru 85 10000
Yemen 85 2500
CostaRica 86 11500
Palau 86 8100
Philippines 86 4100
Tonga 86 7500
Bolivia 87 4800
Brazil 87 11600
Indonesia 87 4700
Iraq 87 3900
Kuwait 87 40700
Netherlands 87 42300
Ecuador 88 8300
Mexico 88 15100
WesternSahara 88 2500
CookIslanads 89 9100
Laos 89 2700
Mauritius 89 15000
Serbia 89 10700
Suriname 89 9500
Bermuda 90 69900
Chile 90 16100
Turkey 90 14600
Lithuania 91 18700
Romania 91 12300
Thailand 91 9700
Armenia 92 5400
Greece 92 27600
Ireland 92 39500
Malaysia 92 15600
Argentina 93 17400
Bulgaria 93 13500
BosniaHerzogovina 94 8200
Vietnam 94 3300
Israel 95 31000
Poland 95 20100
Portugal 95 23200
Ukraine 95 7200
Slovakia 96 23400
Slovenia 96 29100
Uruguay 96 15400
Hungary 97 19600
Italy 97 30100
Malta 97 25700
Russia 97 16700
Australia 98 40800
CzechRepublic 98 25900
Denmark 98 40200
France 98 35000
Spain 98 30600
UnitedStates 98 48100
Belgium 99 37600
Canada 99 40300
Croatia 99 18300
Estonia 99 20200
Finland 99 38300
Germany 99 37900
NewZealand 99 27900
Sweden 99 40600
Austria 100 41700
Mongolia 100 4500
Netherlands 100 42300
Norway 100 53300
UnitedKingdom 100 35900
Iceland 101 38000
Switzerland 101 43400
China 105 8800
Japan 105 34300
Taiwan 105 37900
SouthKorea 106 31700
HongKong 108 49300
Singapore 108 59900

 

[George S]

ApostateAbe, What is the correlation between IQ and latitude? I suspect a more than .5.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is a powerful explanation, as IQ is mostly heritable within groups per identical twin studies, IQ variations have a moderate relationship to variations of economic productivity, and allele frequencies vary significantly among the races. ronburgundy, IQ is known to have a causal effect on the level of education, but the claim that education increases IQ is still not established. It is only speculation, though it should not be ignored.

The problem is that your data doesn't exclude environmental effects. The stupid areas are the areas with a lot more endemic diseases.

ApostateAbe, What is the correlation between IQ and latitude? I suspect a more than .5.

Yeah--his map clearly shows the tropics are stupid.

However, that doesn't rebut the IQ--wealth correlation. The tropics could very well be making people both stupid and poor.

 

[ronburgundy]

ApostateAbe, What is the correlation between IQ and latitude? I suspect a more than .5.

You would be correct.
IQ is correlated similarly with latitude and GDP at about .75.
[/URL]
That doesn't really undermine the point though. Latitude is correlated to genetic lineage, ancestral history of migrations and exposure to various selection pressures.
The genetic contributor to IQ predicts that it should be correlated to latitude, because latitude impacts some of the evolutionary pressures that would have shaped the genetics that contribute to IQ.

It does mean that latitude could cause other environmental factors that then impact GDP in ways independent of any influence of IQ.
However, analyses that use both IQ and latitude as simultaneous predictors of GDP, show that IQ is the strongest single predictor, which is more consistent with a direct role of IQ rather than a spurious relation due to shared influence from latitude related environment.

[P]
Indeed in all models that I tried with their data and the
additional variables in Table 1 [latitude, race, religion, prior communist rule], IQ remains the strongest
independent predictor of GDP. [/P]

 

[ronburgundy]

ronburgundy, IQ is known to have a causal effect on the level of education, but the claim that education increases IQ is still not established. It is only speculation, though it should not be ignored.

Can you cite your evidence establishing a causal impact of IQ on education? This meta-analyses concludes that their is evidence for both causal directions, and that the results depend upon how the analytic techniques are biased by a priori assumptions of the causal direction.

 

[ApostateAbe]

ronburgundy, IQ is known to have a causal effect on the level of education, but the claim that education increases IQ is still not established. It is only speculation, though it should not be ignored.

Can you cite your evidence establishing a causal impact of IQ on education? This meta-analyses concludes that their is evidence for both causal directions, and that the results depend upon how the analytic techniques are biased by a priori assumptions of the causal direction.

The causal relationship from IQ to educational attainment potential is the primary purpose of the measure of IQ. The article you cited contains this paragraph, briefly laying out the case:

Does higher intelligence beget better educational outcomes?

In longitudinal studies that measure psychometric intelligence first and educational attainments later (thus assessing that causal chain), there is a moderate to strong correlation between the two, as assessed by years spent in full-time education, the highest qualification obtained by a person or the scores obtained on educational assessments.⁵ [Jencks C . Who Gets Ahead?: The Determinants of Economic Success in America. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1979.] For example, in a study of approximately 70 000 children in the UK, the general factor from the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) battery taken at age 11 years correlated about 0.8 with the general factor of grades on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations taken at age 16 years.⁶ [Deary IJ, Strand S, Smith P, Fernandes C . Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence 2007;35:13-21.] The general factor of the CAT test had very similar loadings from the three domains of verbal, non-verbal (abstract) and quantitative reasoning. Older studies have reported correlations ranging from 0.60 to 0.96.^7–9 [Bouchard TJ . Twins reared together: what they tell us about human diversity. In: Fox SF, editor. Individuality and Determinism. New York: Plenum Publishing Corp; 1984. p. 147-84.; Kemp L . Environmental and other characteristics determining attainments in primary schools. Brit J Edu Psychol 1955;25:67-77.; Wiseman S . Environmental and innate factors and educational attainment. In: Meade J, Parks AS, editors. Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability. London: Oliver and Boyd; 1966. p. 64-79.] The conclusion from such studies might be that intelligence has stronger causal effects on educational results than vice versa.​

This evidence should be considered on top of the foundational knowledge that intelligence variations are mostly heritable, a point known from twin studies and a point also acknowledged by that article, implying: if education can change IQ, there is a small upper limit of that effect due to the much larger influence of genetic variations.

 

[ApostateAbe]

ApostateAbe, What is the correlation between IQ and latitude? I suspect a more than .5.

I am not sure if anyone has calculated the correlation between average IQ and the magnitude of latitude, though it would be interesting. The more useful correlation is the very controversial correlation value between average SKIN COLOR and average IQ of nations of mostly indigenous populations: -0.9. It is from the study by Templer and Arikawa, "Temperature, skin color, per capita income, and IQ: An international perspective," 2006.

 

[ronburgundy]

Can you cite your evidence establishing a causal impact of IQ on education? This meta-analyses concludes that their is evidence for both causal directions, and that the results depend upon how the analytic techniques are biased by a priori assumptions of the causal direction.

The causal relationship from IQ to educational attainment potential is the primary purpose of the measure of IQ.

And the purpose of theories of racial intelligence was to rationalize slavery and mistreatment of non-whites. It unscientific purpose has nothing to do with what is true and what the measure reflects. Nothing about how g is measured makes it a measure of a cause rather than an effect. In fact, g is nothing but a statistical outcome on various tests, thus it is only a direct measure of effects and not causes. It is a measure of the common effect of some yet to be clarified cognitive skills on the outcome performance of various cognitive tasks. The question is what are those underlying skills and what impacts their development?, and how does the relative importance of those factors change depending upon whether your talking about variance within groups that share similar environments versus between groups, who often by their very definition as groups differ between groups in their environments more systematically than people within each group does?.
You repeatedly draw conclusions for the last question, claiming, that its genetics and that impact does not differ for various types of group comparisons, even though none of your data ever even speaks to the question.

The article you cited contains this paragraph, briefly laying out the case:

Does higher intelligence beget better educational outcomes?

In longitudinal studies that measure psychometric intelligence first and educational attainments later (thus assessing that causal chain), there is a moderate to strong correlation between the two, as assessed by years spent in full-time education, the highest qualification obtained by a person or the scores obtained on educational assessments.⁵ [Jencks C . Who Gets Ahead?: The Determinants of Economic Success in America. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1979.] For example, in a study of approximately 70 000 children in the UK, the general factor from the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) battery taken at age 11 years correlated about 0.8 with the general factor of grades on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations taken at age 16 years.⁶ [Deary IJ, Strand S, Smith P, Fernandes C . Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence 2007;35:13-21.] The general factor of the CAT test had very similar loadings from the three domains of verbal, non-verbal (abstract) and quantitative reasoning. Older studies have reported correlations ranging from 0.60 to 0.96.^7–9 [Bouchard TJ . Twins reared together: what they tell us about human diversity. In: Fox SF, editor. Individuality and Determinism. New York: Plenum Publishing Corp; 1984. p. 147-84.; Kemp L . Environmental and other characteristics determining attainments in primary schools. Brit J Edu Psychol 1955;25:67-77.; Wiseman S . Environmental and innate factors and educational attainment. In: Meade J, Parks AS, editors. Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability. London: Oliver and Boyd; 1966. p. 64-79.] The conclusion from such studies might be that intelligence has stronger causal effects on educational results than vice versa.​

Note the very important and explicit qualifier in what you quoted. It said, "might" because that conclusion only seems to be supported by a superficial analysis of only the limited subset of studies reviewed in that paragraph. The very next paragraph lays out the case for causal impact of education on IQ.

"The conclusion from such studies might be that education influences the development of intelligence. However, this requires the caveat that the so-called ‘intelligence tests’ should be scrutinized to examine the extent to which they contain materials that appear in the taught curriculum.

So, it is possible that intelligence causes differences in educational outcomes, or that education causes intelligence differences, or a bit of both. Indeed, it is probably more complex than this. Readers can find further detailed consideration of possible non-linear effects of schooling on mental test scores, and the parts played by measurement error in intelligence and education measurement in a rather technical paper by Hansen et al."​

The rest of the article goes onto to point out the analytic flaws and assumptions underlying epidemiological work claiming to show evidence of either causal direction, and how more and different types of data and analyses are requires to disentangle the mess of potential causal models capable of producing the non-experimental, correlational data inherent to all of these studies.

The idea that you are approaching this topic objectively and non-politically is undermined by your cherry-picking of the one paragraph in an 8 page paper that generally refutes your position that one causal direction is "known" while the other is "only speculation".

This evidence should be considered on top of the foundational knowledge that intelligence variations are mostly heritable, a point known from twin studies and a point also acknowledged by that article, implying: if education can change IQ, there is a small upper limit of that effect due to the much larger influence of genetic variations.

IOW, the centerpiece of your argument is the statistical fallacy that underlies almost all your arguments about IQ, namely your assumption that whatever determines the majority of variance at the individual level must be what is responsible for group-level differences. I have explained to you multiple times why this is false, so I won't bother with it again. But besides that, your "mostly heritable" claim is not true. The article cites that the estimate for genetics on childhood IQ is "< 50%", which means it is mostly environmental during the childhood years where education is occurring and where IQ and both amount of level and quality of education would be influencing each other. Regardless, "mostly" is irrelevant, because their is more than enough variance for genes and environment for either to be the primary determinant of group-level differences, which need not be and often are not due to the same proportion of causes responsible with within group or overall variance.

 

[rousseau]

Yea. The skew itself discredits the validity of IQ tests. If it accurately measured.. well.. whatever it's measuring in the first place, then you would expect a much, much smaller variance. But if you're comparing a country filled with highly skilled workers, to a country with high illiteracy, how can you isolate 'intelligence' as a variable?

Let me preface by saying that I agree that it is highly likely that much of the between region variance in that map is due to education.

That said, there is no need to isolate "intelligence" from "education". Education is a perfectly plausible causal impact on intelligence, even if intelligence reflects a set fundamental cognitive skills that generally impact learning and problem solving, and is remains stable across the lifespan after a stage of early development.
The non-straw man conception of general intelligence that is studied and accepted as scientifically useful by most cognitive scientists allows for influence from education, and other environmental factor from nutrition to lead exposure, especially in early childhood.

Also, why would you expect a "much smaller variance" if the test were valid? It should vary as much as the thing it is measuring varies, given its level of sensitivity to small variations. Nothing about the amount of observed variance speaks to its validity.
The skew of the variance is a separate issue and does potentially speak to its validity, but maybe not. Not all variables are normally distributed. In fact, evolution often creates non-normally distributed traits due to different selection pressures on different subsets. Also, the map doesn't even show a non-normal distribution at the aggregate level, only that different levels of the distribution are non-randomly dispersed by location, which no reasonable theory of intelligence would predict it should be, given that it would impact how, where, and who migrates, and differential survival of different intelligence levels depending upon geographic location and migratory trajectory to wind up there.

The result that would most undermine the validity of IQ would be if, against all odds, something tied to reasoning and general problem solving wound up randomly distributed across all geographic areas.

The actual specific pattern of how IQ is distributed may well be more in line with effects of education, but neither the variance, its skew, nor it being non-randomly distributed are problematic for its validity, and the latter supports it. Also, if education winds up being the causal factor for the geographic pattern rather than any genetic variance that isn't even a problem for the validity of IQ or the concept of general intelligence. It would only mean that the kind of major educational differences that exist between cultures with centuries of pervasive differences are sufficient to impact whatever the test measures. Only a strawman theory of 100% genetic determinism would be invalidated by that. Education impacts very fundamental cognitive skills that in turn impact lifelong learning across many contexts, some of which are also impacted by genetic factors (which vary more within than between geographic groups). IQ is only claimed to measure such general cognitive skills, so if education is among the factors that influence them, then there is no problem. Also, education can plausibly have massive impact early in life that cannot be undone by later experiences. Thus, even the notion that these skill get set early then remain stable constraints is left untouched by the potential impact of education on cross cultural aggregate differences.

The question is: what is an IQ test actually measuring?

I doubt that's clear, but I'll just go with the words I find and go from there. From wikipedia:

An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess human intelligence.

So what the hell is 'intelligence'?

Let's go with dictionary.com

capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

If you're going to build a test that measures someone's 'capacity for learning and reasoning' and you don't isolate all other variables, including education, income level, etc, etc, then you're not really measuring someone's 'capacity for learning', you're actually measuring their capacity for learning multiplied by environmental factors. I assume that's what's happening because I wouldn't expect as high as a 30% variance based on genetics alone, and I certainly wouldn't expect an economically poor geographic area to be consistently low-scoring.

In other words, someone who scores a 95 in Sudan might actually be a 120 in Canada given better economic conditions. If you don't account for those factors which directly affect how a person interacts with the IQ test itself, then you're not measuring intelligence as defined as 'capacity to learn and reason'.

OTOH, you probably ARE measuring people's 'capacity to learn' based on genetics AND environmental factors, so the map gives us a pretty good idea that education and infrastructure actually makes people smarter.

And in IQ's defense, it is still a useful tool when you localize your sample to a smaller variable set. For instance, if you were to test only people in Ontario, one person's 90 to another person's 120 might mean a little more.

 

[Trausti]

You would be correct.
IQ is correlated similarly with latitude and GDP at about .75.
[/URL]
That doesn't really undermine the point though. Latitude is correlated to genetic lineage, ancestral history of migrations and exposure to various selection pressures.
The genetic contributor to IQ predicts that it should be correlated to latitude, because latitude impacts some of the evolutionary pressures that would have shaped the genetics that contribute to IQ.

It does mean that latitude could cause other environmental factors that then impact GDP in ways independent of any influence of IQ.
However, analyses that use both IQ and latitude as simultaneous predictors of GDP, show that IQ is the strongest single predictor, which is more consistent with a direct role of IQ rather than a spurious relation due to shared influence from latitude related environment.

[P]
Indeed in all models that I tried with their data and the
additional variables in Table 1 [latitude, race, religion, prior communist rule], IQ remains the strongest
independent predictor of GDP. [/P]

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000949

 

[bilby]

You would be correct.
IQ is correlated similarly with latitude and GDP at about .75.
[/URL]
That doesn't really undermine the point though. Latitude is correlated to genetic lineage, ancestral history of migrations and exposure to various selection pressures.
The genetic contributor to IQ predicts that it should be correlated to latitude, because latitude impacts some of the evolutionary pressures that would have shaped the genetics that contribute to IQ.

It does mean that latitude could cause other environmental factors that then impact GDP in ways independent of any influence of IQ.
However, analyses that use both IQ and latitude as simultaneous predictors of GDP, show that IQ is the strongest single predictor, which is more consistent with a direct role of IQ rather than a spurious relation due to shared influence from latitude related environment.

[P]
Indeed in all models that I tried with their data and the
additional variables in Table 1 [latitude, race, religion, prior communist rule], IQ remains the strongest
independent predictor of GDP. [/P]

I'd be careful if I were you; Every single person who believes that correlation implies causation is going to die.

GDP may be a strong predictor of IQ; after all, education ain't free, and poverty tends to lead to less time in school - children in poverty have to work, rather than study.

 

[ApostateAbe]

The causal relationship from IQ to educational attainment potential is the primary purpose of the measure of IQ.

And the purpose of theories of racial intelligence was to rationalize slavery and mistreatment of non-whites. It unscientific purpose has nothing to do with what is true and what the measure reflects. Nothing about how g is measured makes it a measure of a cause rather than an effect. In fact, g is nothing but a statistical outcome on various tests, thus it is only a direct measure of effects and not causes. It is a measure of the common effect of some yet to be clarified cognitive skills on the outcome performance of various cognitive tasks. The question is what are those underlying skills and what impacts their development?, and how does the relative importance of those factors change depending upon whether your talking about variance within groups that share similar environments versus between groups, who often by their very definition as groups differ between groups in their environments more systematically than people within each group does?.
You repeatedly draw conclusions for the last question, claiming, that its genetics and that impact does not differ for various types of group comparisons, even though none of your data ever even speaks to the question.

The article you cited contains this paragraph, briefly laying out the case:

Does higher intelligence beget better educational outcomes?

In longitudinal studies that measure psychometric intelligence first and educational attainments later (thus assessing that causal chain), there is a moderate to strong correlation between the two, as assessed by years spent in full-time education, the highest qualification obtained by a person or the scores obtained on educational assessments.⁵ [Jencks C . Who Gets Ahead?: The Determinants of Economic Success in America. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1979.] For example, in a study of approximately 70 000 children in the UK, the general factor from the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) battery taken at age 11 years correlated about 0.8 with the general factor of grades on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations taken at age 16 years.⁶ [Deary IJ, Strand S, Smith P, Fernandes C . Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence 2007;35:13-21.] The general factor of the CAT test had very similar loadings from the three domains of verbal, non-verbal (abstract) and quantitative reasoning. Older studies have reported correlations ranging from 0.60 to 0.96.^7–9 [Bouchard TJ . Twins reared together: what they tell us about human diversity. In: Fox SF, editor. Individuality and Determinism. New York: Plenum Publishing Corp; 1984. p. 147-84.; Kemp L . Environmental and other characteristics determining attainments in primary schools. Brit J Edu Psychol 1955;25:67-77.; Wiseman S . Environmental and innate factors and educational attainment. In: Meade J, Parks AS, editors. Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability. London: Oliver and Boyd; 1966. p. 64-79.] The conclusion from such studies might be that intelligence has stronger causal effects on educational results than vice versa.​

Note the very important and explicit qualifier in what you quoted. It said, "might" because that conclusion only seems to be supported by a superficial analysis of only the limited subset of studies reviewed in that paragraph. The very next paragraph lays out the case for causal impact of education on IQ.

"The conclusion from such studies might be that education influences the development of intelligence. However, this requires the caveat that the so-called ‘intelligence tests’ should be scrutinized to examine the extent to which they contain materials that appear in the taught curriculum.

So, it is possible that intelligence causes differences in educational outcomes, or that education causes intelligence differences, or a bit of both. Indeed, it is probably more complex than this. Readers can find further detailed consideration of possible non-linear effects of schooling on mental test scores, and the parts played by measurement error in intelligence and education measurement in a rather technical paper by Hansen et al."​

The rest of the article goes onto to point out the analytic flaws and assumptions underlying epidemiological work claiming to show evidence of either causal direction, and how more and different types of data and analyses are requires to disentangle the mess of potential causal models capable of producing the non-experimental, correlational data inherent to all of these studies.

The idea that you are approaching this topic objectively and non-politically is undermined by your cherry-picking of the one paragraph in an 8 page paper that generally refutes your position that one causal direction is "known" while the other is "only speculation".

This evidence should be considered on top of the foundational knowledge that intelligence variations are mostly heritable, a point known from twin studies and a point also acknowledged by that article, implying: if education can change IQ, there is a small upper limit of that effect due to the much larger influence of genetic variations.

IOW, the centerpiece of your argument is the statistical fallacy that underlies almost all your arguments about IQ, namely your assumption that whatever determines the majority of variance at the individual level must be what is responsible for group-level differences. I have explained to you multiple times why this is false, so I won't bother with it again. But besides that, your "mostly heritable" claim is not true. The article cites that the estimate for genetics on childhood IQ is "< 50%", which means it is mostly environmental during the childhood years where education is occurring and where IQ and both amount of level and quality of education would be influencing each other. Regardless, "mostly" is irrelevant, because their is more than enough variance for genes and environment for either to be the primary determinant of group-level differences, which need not be and often are not due to the same proportion of causes responsible with within group or overall variance.

ronburgandy, you asked a question that was seemingly NOT about group differences, and I answered the inquiry assuming you were inquiring about within-group variation, not between-group variation. I am not conflating those two patterns. What did you mean to ask about?