This is an on-going thread from the BBC Asian Network discussion forum, which was set up in few years ago to enable British South Asians to discuss various social, cultural and political issues affecting the various desi groups here. In recent years, this forum has been hijacked and essentially turned into a vehicle for Islamist theological propaganda, along with virulently anti-Western sentiment:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbasiannetwork/F2219693?thread=1410081

It is quite a long thread (although most of the messages are relatively brief), but it is a prime example of the kind of stupidity, ignorance and fanaticism which we’re having to deal with on this side of the Atlantic. There are a couple of posts by me too later on in the thread, for all the good it did me. If you have some spare time, please take a look at this. The most disturbing thing is that a number of the “regular” commentors there are making statements almost identical to those in that video by one of the 7/7 bombers, along with the other video released last year by the 2 British Muslims who later conducted a suicide mission in (I think) Israel.

I would be grateful if Manish, Abhi, Ennis, and Saheli in particular would please take some time out to go through this thread — you guys really need to get an idea of the sheer bukwaas we have to face. Feedback from other Mutineers would also be greatly appreciated, of course.

It’s taken a little while for my blood pressure to come back down (unfortunately I’m only semi-joking), but having come “back home” to Sepia Mutiny — and comparing it to the nature of the opinions posted on that thread — I have to say that SM really is a beacon of light. God bless you all

Israel’s 94 is quite low. This can be explained by, yes, a lot of Sephardim compared to Ashkenazim, or perhaps the test included a non-trivial number of Arabs (Israel is 20% Arab), or maybe the test was an outlier. As Steve Sailer has noted, regional numbers are more reliable than individual country numbers (assuming the regional populations are ethnically similar).

India is a special case, and the 81 mean IQ in the book should be regarded with some suspicion.

Here is a good article about the future competitiveness of India and China.

In contrast, Lynn and Vanhanen found four studies of Indian IQ that average out to only 81.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the variance in IQ is greater in India than in China. There may be more geniuses in India than in China but the average level of competence seems lower.

However, putting together a nationally-representative sample is harder in India than anywhere else on Earth. The caste system, by discouraging intermarriage, has in effect subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races. In India, according to Cavalli-Sforza, “The total number of endogamous communities today is around 43,000Â…”

So I would keep an open mind on just what the IQ of India is. And, of course, better nutrition, health care, education, and more outbreeding could all work to raise it.

Well Mark, would you at least grant that the extraordinary achievements of Jews are in part due to biology, i.e. very high mean IQ (about 115 for Ashkenazim?). Many of my Jewish friends have intimated, in a semi-ashamed, semi-proud way that they believe this is true…and I agree!

Well the book you cited to claims that Israelis have an average IQ of 94, below even Americans?! Are there too many Sephardics in Israel? . Wasnt Derrida a Sephardic Jew, he wuz one smart mother!

It also shows that East Germans had an average IQ 10 POINTS below West Germans; this sounds ridiculously unlikely (if IQ is principally based on genetics).

I do not believe the Indian figure at all and would like to see who they tested and how they came up with a representative sample, etc.

When India produces more patents than America in twenty years – as an article in the economist recently predicted – we’ll see if this argument is still being bandied about

So I am, like Umair, skeptical.

And yes, I realize this is waay off thread.

But thanks for the interesting perpsective.

Umair, I don’t suppose we can have the whole “what is IQ” debate here, but IQ — or smarts, or g, or intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, appears to exist quite clearly, and to be somewhere between 40 and 80% hereditary. See Charles Murray’s recent Commentary essay for the details.

That’s it from me — thanks for the discussion.

I obviously see and acknowledge that we have foundational disagreements here– your insinuation that the IQ explanation is so self-evident that those refusing to accept it must be acting in bad faith or out of sheer dogma is unfair. Because my foundational criticism has not been addressed.

[That is, an opponent of IQ would say that the proponents of IQ are no-less ideologically driven than the opponents-- in their refusal to acknowledge the social construct that purports to measure an intelligence quotient, in their refusal to acknowledge the history and origins of the single number purporting to size up people, not to mention that in general the notion of science as utterly divorced from ideological considerations is simply not borne out by history.]

Muslims of the world are among the poorest of the poor by Dr Farrukh Saleem

http://www.jang-group.com/thenew…ped/o6.htm

The combined annual GDP of 57 Muslim countries remains under $2 trillion. America, just by herself, produces goods and services worth $10.4 trillion; China $5.7 trillion, Japan $3.5 trillion and Germany $2.1 trillion. Even India’s GDP is estimated at over $3 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).

Oil rich Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods and services (mostly oil) worth $430 billion; Netherlands alone has a higher annual GDP while Buddhist Thailand produces goods and services worth $429 billion.

Muslims are 22 percent of the world population and produce less than five percent of global GDP. Even more worrying is that the Muslim countries’ GDP as a percent of the global GDP is going down over time. The Arabs, it seems, are particularly worse off. According to the United Nations’ Arab Development Report: “Half of Arab women cannot read; One in five Arabs live on less than $2 per day; Only 1 percent of the Arab population has a personal computer, and only half of 1 percent use the Internet; Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed, and this number could double by 2010; The average growth rate of the per capita income during the preceding 20 years in the Arab world was only one-half of 1 percent per annum, worse than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa.”

The planet’s poorest countries include Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Mozambique. At least six of the poorest of the poor are countries with a Muslim majority.

Conclusion: Muslims of the world are among the poorest of the poor.

Fifty-seven Muslim majority countries have an average of ten universities each for a total of less than 600 universities for 1.4 billion people; India has 8,407 universities, the U.S. has 5,758. From within 1.4 billion Muslims Abdus Salam and Ahmed Zewail are the only two Muslim men who won a Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry (Salam pursued his scientific work in Italy and the UK, Zewail at California Institute of Technology). Dr Salam in his home country is not even considered a Muslim.

Over the past 105 years, 1.4 billion Muslims have produced eight Nobel Laureates while a mere 14 million Jews have produced 167 Nobel Laureates. Of the 1.4 billion Muslims less than 300,000 qualify as ‘scientists’, and that converts to a ratio of 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The United States of America has 1.1 million scientists (4,099 per million); Japan has 700,000 (5,095 per million).

Fact: Of the 1.4 billion Muslims 800 million are illiterate (6 out of 10 Muslims cannot read). In Christendom, adult literacy rate stands at 78 percent.

Consider, for instance, that Muslims constitute 22 percent of world population with a 1 percent share of Nobel Prizes. Jews constitute 0.23 percent of world population with a 22 percent share of Nobel Prizes.

What really went wrong? Muslims are poor, illiterate and weak. What went wrong? Arriving at the right diagnosis is extremely critical because the prescription depends on it. Consider this:

Diagnosis 1: Muslims are poor, illiterate and weak because they have ‘abandoned the divine heritage of Islam’. Prescription: We must return to our real or imagined past.

Diagnosis 2: Muslims are poor, illiterate and weak because we have refused to change with time.

I presume BG would throw in “low IQ” as diagnosis 3

The reality is, there are a lot of countries well below the 90 average IQ threshold estimated by Lynn and Vanhanen needed to build and sustain a technological economy. It’s probably more like 95. At any rate, lots of countries just won’t be able to reach this anytime in the foreseeable future if the IQ theory is right (and it is).

Similarly, all the discussions you’re seeing now in the papers about why many Moroccans and Algerians are having a hard time climbing the ladder in France simply ignore this partial explanation, focusing only on discrimination or cultural differences. I don’t discount the effects of those two, but without IQ, it’s mostly moot anyway.

India had a higher percentage of world GDP in the 50s than it does today.

You don’t find it at least interesting that average national IQ correlates very well (0.73) with per capita income by country? Well, how does .91 grab you?

This is such a strong (and intuitively logical) correlation that those who deny it outright — that there is no possibility that mean IQ plays even a small role in determining a country’s wealth — are showing themselves to be more ideologically than scientifically driven. Indeed, the only reaction Blank Slaters have been able to come up with in response to Lynn and Vanhanen’s book since its publication in 2002 is to suppress/ignore it.

India was ahead of China economically in the fifties. Now they’ve surged ahead. The Neo-Darwinians cite “IQ” as an apparent reason for this, when it has everything to do with policy.

Well, China had a totally centrally-planned economy then, and frankly, neither China nor India had much of an economy period in the 1950s, so saying one was ahead of the other isn’t saying much.

High average IQ alone isn’t enough to make a country rich. You also need a free-market economy, rule of law, and democracy helps, too. But high average IQ appears to be one of several sine qua nons for a country to be rich.

Getting back to the topic at hand, then, if Moroccans and Algerians in France have an average IQ of around 85, then that’s not really enough for the entire group to assimilate into the larger populace.