[INTERESTING NEWS] Why Do IQ Scores Vary By Nation?

Why Do IQ Scores Vary By Nation?

Global differences in intelligence is a sensitive topic, long fraught with controversy and still tinged by the disgraceful taint of pseudosciences such as craniometry that strove to prove the white “race” as the most clever of them all. But recent data, perplexingly, has indeed shown cognitive ability to be higher in some countries than in others. What’s more, IQ scores have risen as nations develop—a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect.” Many causes have been proposed for both the intelligence gap and the Flynn effect, including education, income, and even nonagricultural labor. Now, a new study from researchers at the University of New Mexico offers another intriguing theory: intelligence may be linked to infectious-disease rates.

The Idea

The brain, say author Christopher Eppig and his colleagues, is the “most costly organ in the human body.” Brainpower gobbles up close to 90 percent of a newborn’s energy. It stands to reason, then, that if something interferes with energy intake while the brain is growing, the impact could be serious and longlasting. And for vast swaths of the globe, the biggest threat to a child’s body—and hence brain—is parasitic infection. These illnesses threaten brain development in several ways. They can directly attack live tissue, which the body must then strain to replace. They can invade the digestive tract and block nutritional uptake. They can hijack the body’s cells for their own reproduction. And then there’s the energy diverted to the immune system to fight the infection. Out of all the parasites, the diarrheal ones may be the gravest threat—they can prevent the body from getting any nutrients at all.

The Evidence

Using data on national “disease burdens” (life years lost due to infectious diseases) and average intelligence scores, the authors found a striking inverse correlation—around 67 percent. The countries with the lowest average IQ scores—Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Mozambique, Gabon—have among the highest disease burdens. In contrast, nations with low disease burdens top the IQ list, with Singapore, South Korea, China, Japan, and Italy in the lead.

study controlled for other potential causes of the IQ gap, such as the aforementioned education, agricultural labor, and income levels, as well as climate (colder lands tend to have higher IQ scores, and some theorists have proposed that lower temperatures may evolutionarily select for higher intelligence) and distance from humanity’s African cradle, which is the notion that unfamiliar lands might have forced migrating humans to become smarter. However, with the exception of this last theory—which has in any case been challenged—it turns out that “infectious disease remains the most powerful predictor of average national IQ.” The study’s findings may also help explain the Flynn effect, which can’t be accounted for by evolution (the IQ gains occur over time spans too short for natural selection). So what’s going on instead? As nations develop, they improve their population’s access to safe drinking water and to vaccines and medicine—all of which lower parasitic infection rates.

The Conclusion

If the study holds up, it could be revolutionary for our understanding of the still-bewildering variation in national intelligence scores—and also a pressing injunction to continue the fight against malaria and other developing-world diseases, which some global-health watchers have recently declared unbeatable.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/26/why-do-iq-scores-vary-by-nation.html 

[WORLD NEWS] Russia’s Activists Lose Hope in President

Russia’s Activists Lose Hope in President

The resignation of Russia’s top human-rights chief highlights the Kremlin’s backsliding.

by Anna NemtsovaAugust 03, 2010

Oxana Onipko / AFP-Getty Images

Police officers in Moscow arrest an opposition protester at a rally on July 31

When Dmitry Medvedev was elected president of Russia two years ago, he publicly criticized the country’s human-rights record as “far from perfect” and called for reform. But just last week, Medvedev’s image as a civil-rights champion was dealt a stunning blow when his chief adviser on human rights, Ella Pamfilova, resigned. Her reason? A new wave of violent attacks and threats against Russia’s human-rights activists, as well as what Pamfilova calls the “never-ending wave of hate” from the Kremlin toward anyone critical of its policies. (A Kremlin spokesperson would only comment that Pamfilova was not pushed out, but resigned of her own accord.)

The past year has been a brutal one for activists in Russia: three have been killed and four evacuated from the country since last summer. Last month, state bureaucrats dubbed activists with the human-rights group Memorial—one of the most distinguished NGOs in Russia—“enemies of the people” and “worse than terrorists.” And at the annual July retreat of the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi, members openly paraded about an effigy—dressed in Nazi regalia—of Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the 83-year-old former dissident and leader of the human-rights monitor Helsinki Group. Though Pamfilova brought the incident to the Kremlin’s attention—and though Alekseyeva is a member of Medvedev’s human-rights council—Nashi went unpunished. It was the final straw for Pamfilova, who promptly quit in protest.

The Nashi incident is only the latest indication that the Kremlin may be turning away from a political thaw, and back toward both tacit and active repression of its critics. Police have been targeting public displays of dissent: in two separate late-July incidents in Moscow and St. Petersburg, officers arrested and beat scores of people protesting various government projects, such as the demolition of a public park. Activists are also deeply worried about a new law that will give Russia’s FSB—a successor to the KGB—the right to jail citizens who “obstruct” the agency’s work, even if they haven’t committed a crime.

Whether Medvedev approves of this new direction, or whether he lacks the power to stop it, remains unknown. But after her resignation, Pamfilova indicated that the latter may be the case: “The president ordered the prosecutor-general to investigate the violations [against protesters] many months ago,” she said. “Nobody seems to obey the president’s orders.” Pamfilova also noted that in early March, Medvedev ordered an inquiry into compensation for families of victims of the 2008 war in Georgia; the directive has never been carried out by the president’s administrators.

Regardless, there may be little that even Medvedev can do to change the system right now, say experts. “The problem is that the majority of our men in power cannot tolerate any criticism,” says Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov, who said activists are officially targeted because they are “prying too deeply in the most untouchable themes of…errors in the Kremlin’s policy.” Activists agree: “[We] have become too loud, too internationally recognized,” said Alekseyeva, the Helsinki Group’s leader. “Of course it is easier to shut us up than to follow the law.”