What is an IQ map and can we trust them?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: More or Less: Behind the Stats

Episode: What is an IQ map and can we trust them?
Host: Charlotte Macdonald (BBC Radio 4)
Date: March 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Charlotte Macdonald and guests critically examine the validity and meaning of widely-shared “IQ maps” that claim to show average intelligence scores for different countries around the world. The episode addresses where these numbers come from, why they’re so problematic, and the deeper issues involved when intelligence is mapped and compared globally.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Viral “IQ Map” Phenomenon

• [01:38] Introduction to a colorful map circulating on social media that displays supposed average IQ scores by country, with Europeans and Asians scoring the highest, and African countries among the lowest.
• Example: Equatorial Guinea (59), Nepal (42), India (82) – numbers that seem "crazy," causing concern and alarm.
• Charlotte Macdonald:

  “Buckle up. We’re about to head into the upside down of statistical analysis.” ([01:57])

2. Origins and Construction of the IQ Map

• [03:05] Guest Karim Khan (Harvard Biostatistics PhD student, science communicator) often debunks these maps, tracing them to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" (2002) by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.
• The book’s controversial background:
  • Richard Lynn is described as self-styled "scientific racist" and editor of a white supremacist magazine.
  • The book attempted to correlate IQ with wealth using estimated country scores.

3. Questionable Data and Methodology

• [04:33] Karim Khan:

  “The numbers they have for the African countries are like ridiculous. You know, like in the 50s and 60s.”

• Problems arise because actual IQ data was unavailable for many countries.

  • Over half (“104 of 185 countries”) were filled with estimates rather than real data. ([05:11])
  • Estimates were made by:
    • Using small, unrepresentative groups (e.g., children in institutions for the developmentally disabled).
    • Extrapolating from neighboring countries.
    • Testing populations where conditions (malnutrition, unfamiliar language, etc.) skewed results.

• Striking examples:

  • Equatorial Guinea: score based on children in a Spanish institution for the developmentally disabled, not a representative sample. ([05:45])
  • Somalia: refugees in Kenya.
  • Botswana: 104 non-native English-speaking kids in South Africa.
  • Malawi, Burkina Faso, St. Vincent & Grenadines, and Haiti: based on small, rural, often malnourished or under-schooled groups.

• Karim Khan:

  “The estimate for Nepal is based on rural children and mothers suffering from malnutrition...they were studying malnutrition as part of the study…And these are the numbers these guys use in their analysis.” ([06:44])

4. Misleading Interpretations and the Myth of Racial Intelligence Hierarchies

• [07:14] The issue:
  • While the data is sometimes valid for very specific groups, it is not comparable between countries or meaningful at a national/racial level.
  • Severe malnutrition, lack of education, and testing in a non-native language all dramatically affect IQ test outcomes.
  • These maps are misused to support racist ideas that “some races are inherently more intelligent than others.”

5. Do Reliable Global IQ Data Exist?

• [07:48] Enter Angela Saini (science journalist, MIT science writing teacher, author of "Superior"):

  “There’s no way that you could have an IQ map of the world based on consistent data, because that data genuinely doesn’t exist.”

  • No universal standard IQ test administered worldwide.
  • Vast differences in education, language, and context; no way to reliably compare global results.

6. What Actually Influences IQ Scores?

• [08:27] Angela Saini:

  “Education plays a huge role in who does well on IQ tests and who doesn’t. In fact, there has been research to show that children who are adopted into wealthier families, their IQs…go up.”

• Emphasizes the complexity of intelligence, questioning how well IQ tests actually measure it, and how major differences in upbringing, opportunity, and environment cloud meaningful comparison.

7. Race, Genetics, and Intelligence: What Do We Actually Know?

• [09:12] Addressing claims about race and intelligence:
  • Angela Saini:

    “Nobody’s isolated a gene for intelligence, not least because this is a complex trait…There are people who have certain talents…and sometimes there is a hereditary element to that, but that’s not the same as talking about race.”

  • Regression to the mean:

    “A child born to two exceptionally intelligent people is likely to be slightly less intelligent than both of them because of regression to the mean…intelligence varies between individuals, not between groups.” ([09:41])

8. Cautions for Social Media and Public Discourse

• [10:06] Charlotte Macdonald:

  “If you see someone on the Internet shouting about how much brighter one nation or one ethnicity is than another, proceed with caution. The data probably doesn’t say what they think it says.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Charlotte Macdonald [01:57]:

  “Buckle up. We’re about to head into the upside down of statistical analysis.”

• Karim Khan [05:11]:

  “They report 185 countries and of those 104. So more than half of them do not come directly from data.”

• Karim Khan [06:44]:

  “The estimate for Nepal is based on rural children and mothers who were suffering from malnutrition at the time…And these are the numbers that these guys use in their analysis.”

• Angela Saini [07:48]:

  “There’s no way that you could have an IQ map of the world based on consistent data, because that data genuinely doesn’t exist.”

• Angela Saini [08:27]:

  “Education plays a huge role in who does well on IQ tests and who doesn’t…It’s fraught on so many different levels. I really can’t overemphasize just how problematic it is to try and pin down number one, what is intelligence?”

• Angela Saini [09:41]:

  “A child born to two exceptionally intelligent people is likely to be slightly less intelligent than both of them because of regression to the mean…intelligence varies between individuals, not between groups.”

• Charlotte Macdonald [10:06]:

  “If you see someone on the Internet shouting about how much brighter one nation or one ethnicity is than another, proceed with caution.”

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Important Timestamps

• 01:38 – Introduction of the IQ map and its popular presentation online.
• 03:05 – Origins of the global IQ statistics (Lynn & Vanhanen’s book).
• 04:33–06:44 – Deep dive into flawed data sources and estimation methods.
• 07:48 – Angela Saini on why reliable global IQ data does not exist.
• 08:27 – Discussion of environmental impacts on IQ.
• 09:12–10:06 – Debunking race and genetics claims regarding intelligence.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode rigorously debunks widely-held misconceptions about national and racial variations in intelligence as depicted by popular “IQ maps.” Experts highlight the deeply flawed methodologies, lack of reliable data, and the overwhelming influence of social, environmental, and educational factors on IQ test outcomes. The hosts urge listeners to treat these maps—and their racist misinterpretations—with extreme skepticism and to recognize intelligence as a complex, individual trait not meaningfully mapped across nations or ethnicities.

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Transcript

[Charlotte Macdonald]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

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[Charlotte Macdonald]

Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast with a programme that looks at the numbers in the news and the world all around us. And I'm Charlotte MacDonald. Today we're going to be talking about a map that often does the rounds on social media. It's quite an aesthetically pleasing map. Lots of pretty colours, but what it shows is pretty concerning. Each colour represents a country's average iq. Lower scores go through the red orange spectrum, whereas higher scores go from cool to deep blue. Areas like Europe, North America and much of Asia are different shades of blue. In contrast, the African continent looks like the different colours of a bonfire. When you look into the numbers, you realize just how low some of these scores are purported to be. A score of 100 is considered to be average, but Equatorial guinea has an average IQ score of 59, Nepal 42 and India 82. This seems crazy, but alarming data doesn't always mean wrong data. We have well developed IQ tests, so can the results ever really be that wrong? Buckle up. We're about to head into the upside down of statistical analysis.

[Karim Khan]

Hi, my name is Karim I'm a Biostatistics PhD student at Harvard University.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

When he's not writing his thesis, Karim is very much online and often finds himself debunking various versions of that IQ map. These all stem from one book, the IQ of Nations, first published in 2002.

[Karim Khan]

And it was by this guy, Richard Lyn and this other political scientist, Tatu Van Harlennen.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

Tatu Van Harnen was a professor of political science at the University of Tampere, Finland. Richard Lin was a British psychologist who dubbed himself a scientific racist and was the editor for a well known white supremacist magazine.

[Karim Khan]

They were trying to look at the relationship between IQ and wealth. In doing that, they needed IQ scores for all the countries.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

We've all heard of IQ or intelligence quotient. It's basically how well you do in a certain type of test that aims to put a score on how clever you are. The higher the score, the brainier the brain. At least in theory. If you get a score of 100, you're considered to have average intelligence, with the normal range being between 90 to 109. If you look at the intelligence map based on the IQ of nations, Japan and Taiwan take the top spots with scores of 106. This seems fair. Both countries have good education systems and their students are regularly subjected to rigorous testing. But then it all falls apart.

[Karim Khan]

The numbers they have for the African countries are like ridiculous. You know, like in the 50s and 60s.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

If this is correct and the average IQ level is 60, then these countries would have a significant amount of people whose IQ would be below 60.

[Karim Khan]

Basically, there's like a huge number of people that should be in the 30s and even 20s.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

Meaning that if you judge it by the standards in the US or Europe, large swathes of people in the African continent would have profound developmental issues, which we know is not the case. So why are the numbers so odd?

[Karim Khan]

They report 185 countries and of those 104. So more than half of them do not come directly from data.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

That'll do it. The authors found that IQ data simply didn't exist for many countries. So they estimated what the likely IQ of one country might be based on IQ data from their neighbouring countries. However, the data from these countries was often taken from very small studies that weren't necessarily an accurate representation of the whole population.

[Karim Khan]

They based the Equatorial guinea numbers on some kids that were in a home for the developmentally disabled. So these kids from Equatorial guinea weren't even in their home country. They were in Spain, but they weren't.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

The only set of questionable results.

[Karim Khan]

So the estimate for Somalia was based on a single sample of refugees living in a refugee camp in Kenya. The estimate for Botswana is based on 104 kids living in South Africa who were tested in English, even though English wasn't their native language. The estimate from Malawi is based on a sample of rural children where 8% never attended school, 15% dropped out. The estimate for Burkino Faso is based on rural children. The estimate for St. Vincent and the Grenadines is based on a single sample of 174 rural children. The Haitian estimate is mostly based on 133 rural 6 year olds.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

The list goes on.

[Karim Khan]

The estimate for Nepal is based on rural children and mothers who were suffering from malnutrition at the time. So this study, they were studying malnutrition as part of the study of how malnutrition was affecting this population. They collected IQ data. So the goal was to look and see how their IQs might have been reduced by malnutrition. And these are the numbers that these guys use in their analysis.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

The thing is, the data used isn't always bad data in itself, but it doesn't show us what Lin and some people who post the IQ map say it shows, which is that they believe some races are inherently more intelligent than others. Instead, it tells us that severe malnutrition can cause cognitive issues, that children with developmental delays have developmental delays, and that if you ask people questions in a foreign language, they might not get the answers right. So do we actually have reliable data for this?

[Angela Saini]

There's no way that you could have an IQ map of the world based on consistent data, because that data genuinely doesn't exist. My name's Angela Saini. I'm a science journalist. I teach science writing at mit and I've written a book on race science called Superior. There is no one standard test that everybody does universally that you could then compare the data from different countries so.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

The data does not exist. Even if a universal IQ test did exist, the results are likely to have a lot to do with factors way outside of your genetics.

[Angela Saini]

Education plays a huge role in who does well on IQ tests and who doesn't. In fact, there has been research to show that children who are adopted into wealthier families, their IQs, their intelligence test scores go up. So it's fraught on so many different levels. I really can't over emphasize just how problematic it is to try and pin down number one, what is intelligence? How do you measure it? How do you make sure that the people you're measuring it in have exactly the same level of education and access to the same kind of ideas that that test is measuring for. It's incredibly difficult.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

So what about this theory that one race can be more intelligent than another?

[Angela Saini]

Nobody's isolated a gene for intelligence, not least because this is a complex trait. So if there are genes associated with intelligence, there are very many of them. There are people who have certain talents, intellectual talents, musical talents, all kinds of things, and sometimes there is a hereditary element to that, but that's not the same as talking about race.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

What's more intelligent parents don't necessarily equate to super intelligent children.

[Angela Saini]

A child born to two exceptionally intelligent people is likely to be slightly less intelligent than both of them because of regression to the mean. So in statistical terms, you know this idea, it's a very old idea that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. There's a bit of truth to that, but the bigger truth is that intelligence varies between individuals, not between groups.

[Charlotte Macdonald]

So if you see someone on the Internet shouting about how much brighter one nation or one ethnicity is than another, proceed with caution. The data probably doesn't say what they think it says. That's all we have time for this week. Thank you to Karim Khan and Angela Saini. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please write in to more or [e-mail] until next week. Goodbye.

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