European IQ map proves Brits are brainy By GLEN OWEN, Mail On Sunday Last updated at 16:30 26 March 2006 • Comments (0) • Add to My Stories It's a discovery that is bound to leave French pride smarting: new research has revealed that we Brits are markedly more intelligent than them. While Britons managed eighth place in a new European league table of IQ scores, with an average of 100, the French languished in 19th place with a score of just 94. Is it irresponsible to judge entire countries in this way? Tell us in reader comments below. But it's not all good news. Britain was not only trounced by Germany and the Netherlands, which came top of the heap, but by five other nations including Poland and Italy. The league table has been compiled by Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, who has ranked average national IQ scores for the first time. His research not only reveals significant differences across the continent but within the UK as well. Professor Lynn has discovered that Scotland and Ireland lag behind England in the intelligence stakes, while the population of London and the South East is top of the domestic league. The professor has spent 30 years scrutinising thousands of test results from around the world to investigate the role of evolution in IQ and has published his results in a new book. He concludes that in Europe, adults in Germany and the Netherlands have the highest average IQ at 107, compared with 100 across Britain. The UK is also beaten by Poland (106), Sweden (104), Italy (102), Austria (101) and Switzerland (101). But Britons are brighter than people in Belgium (99), Spain (98), Hungary (98), Russia (96), Greece (95), France (94), Romania (94), Turkey (90) and Serbia, which finishes bottom with 89. Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, ahead of Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. Residents of London and the South East average 102. Last night Professor Lynn's findings were attracting a mixed reaction. Rebecca Loos, who claimed she had an affair with David Beckham in 2004 and is the daughter of a Dutch diplomat, said: "The Dutch have always been a highly intelligent nation. Most Dutch people are multilingual and speak an average of three languages fluently. Certainly all of them speak English." An immodest Rebecca, 27, added: "Just look at me - I'm Dutch and look how clever I am!" But Romanian pop twins The Cheeky Girls - Gabriela and Monica Irimia - said it was an "insult" to their nation to suggest its average IQ was 94. 'Our father is head of the ambulance service in Romania," said Gabriela, 23. "He's a doctor of medicine and extremely intelligent. We completed 18 years of college and managed to juggle singing training as well." Britain does well in another of Professor Lynn's measures. He found that university students here have the second-highest undergraduate IQs in the world at 109, pipped only by those in America on 110. The professor, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, warns that some of his results could be subject to 'sampling errors'. But he says the geographic trends are consistent and can be explained by theories of evolution and migration. He claims that populations in the colder and more challenging environments of northern Europe have developed larger brains than those in the balmier climates of the south. The average brain size in northern and central Europe is 1,320 cubic centimetres, but in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. "The early humans in northerly areas had to survive during cold winters when there were no plant foods and were forced to hunt big game,' he says. 'The main environmental influence on IQ is diet, and people in south-east Europe would have had less of the proteins, minerals and vitamins provided by meat, which are essential for brain development." However, he dismissed as "an old wives' tale" the theory beloved of Cockneys - that they owe their alleged quick wits to a diet rich in jellied eels. Professor Lynn said the geographical differences in intelligence across Britain could be explained because "over the course of centuries many of the brightest have left the regions to seek their fortune in London". He added: "Once in the capital, they have settled and reared children, and these children have inherited their high intelligence and transmitted it to further generations." The pattern is repeated in other countries - in France, for instance, IQ scores in Paris are much higher than in rural areas. More controversially, Professor Lynn claims the IQ differences between France and Germany can be linked to the results of military confrontations, describing it as "a hitherto unrecog-nised law of history" that "the side with the higher IQ normally wins, unless they are hugely outnumbered, as Germany was after 1942". IQ tests were first used in France in 1904 to identify intelligent children. And since then, experts have estimated that the 18th Century German writer and poet Goethe had the highest IQ in history, at 210. The tests are not a measure of general knowledge, but of how the mind copes with reasoning problems and mental arithmetic. Normal IQ is from 85 to 115, and genius level starts at 145. Professor Lynn has also made a correlation between a country's prosperity and the average IQ of its people, concluding that each average IQ point above 70 is worth about £500 in gross domestic product per person. A spokesman for the German Ambassador to London diplomatically said he was reluctant to comment on the alleged brilliance of his countrymen.
