Against Lynn's Doctrine

Here's another refutation of Richard Lynn's flawed study on Italian IQ:

Lynn's study uses regional differences in the performance of Italian secondary school children on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development tests of educational achievement to assess regional IQ differences. However, data on Italian regional differences in educational achievement obtained in a much larger INVALSI study of 2,089,829 Italian schoolchildren provide unequivocal evidence that Lynn's educational achievement measure is not a valid index of IQ differences. More generally, the lengthy literature review in Lynn's article reveals uncritical acceptance of reported correlations between any putative index of IQ and socio-economic variables. Any measure of cognitive performance that is correlated with IQ is considered a measure of IQ, even if there is only a weak correlation. All correlations between such measures and socio-economic or public health variables are viewed as evidence of direct causal relationships. In all cases, causality is assumed to be in the direction that supports Lynn's doctrine when it would be equally valid to argue that socio-economic and public health differences cause differences in the performance of IQ tests. In addition to these fundamental logical and statistical errors the present report records numerous other data processing, methodological, and conceptual errors.

Robinson et al. "The case against Lynn's doctrine that population IQ determines levels of socio-economic development and public health status". J Pub Ment Health, 2011.

Some Perspective on Italian IQ

A new paper tries to evaluate the evidence in the recent debate about Italian IQ. The author has a little too much faith in Richard Lynn and the validity of his data, but still challenges his simplistic genetic explanations for north-south disparities, and urges caution when interpreting correlations between IQ and other variables.

The present study was intended to provide perspective, albeit less than unequivocal, on the research of Lynn (2010) who reported higher IQs in the northern than southern Italian regions. He attributes this to northern Italians having a greater genetic similarity to middle Europeans and southern Italians to Mediterranean people. Higher regional IQ was associated with biological variables more characteristic of middle European than Mediterranean populations (cephalic index, eye color, hair color, multiple sclerosis rates, schizophrenia rates). It was maintained, however, that very confident and definitive inferences regarding genetic regional differences in IQ are not warranted. Social conceptualized variables also correlated significantly with IQ so as to suggest the importance of nutrition and economic developmental status more generally.

[...]

One should also bear in mind that the correlations are ecological correlations and have the limitations associated with such. Prince (1998) succinctly described three problems with ecological correlations. One problem, the "ecological fallacy," is that people who are high or low in one variable are not necessarily the same people who are high or low on the other variable. In the present study the people in a region who are high in cephalic index are not necessarily the same people who are high in IQ. The second problem is that a third variable may be responsible for the correlation between the other two. In the present study, temperature, precipitation, constituents of drinking water, constituents of soil, health, genetic predisposition to medical disorder, nutrition, and medical care are some of the variables that could conceivably influence the correlation of IQ with schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. The third problem is that cause and effect cannot be determined.

4. Discussion

It is apparent that regions that have at least some biological characteristics more common in middle European than Mediterranean populations (higher cephalic index, lighter eye color and hair, and higher rates of multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia) tend to have higher IQs. This could be viewed consistent with Lynn's (2010) assertion of a genetically based explanation of north-south IQ differences. Great caution, however, is urged regarding such inferences. Since these are ecological correlations, the persons high or low in these biological variables may not be the same persons in that region high or low in IQ. Because some characteristics are different does not mean that all characteristics are different. East Asians have different facial features than Europeans and Africans. These differences, however, may be only remotely related or not related at all to IQ differences. Also, there are notable exceptions to generalizations about IQ and coloration. Most East Asians and Jewish persons are darker than Scandinavians and yet have higher mean IQs. Furthermore, social variables could account, at least in part, for the north-south IQ differences. Nevertheless, examination and discussion of the biological variable findings are warranted.

[...]

The social correlations with IQ and latitude were also substantial and could be viewed as indicating social explanations of the north-south IQ differences. As reasoned above, the massive illiteracy of the south (and even in the north to a lesser extent) could not be explained mainly by genetically determined intelligence. The positive correlation between IQ and literacy suggests that the lower developmental stature of the southern region contributes to the lower IQ. Such an interpretation is also suggested by, as hypothesized, the negative correlation between IQ and percentage increase in stature and negative correlation between income and latitude. This correlation also shows that those regions with the greatest history of malnutrition have lower IQs. As pointed out by Lynn (1990), the secular increase in IQ and stature parallel each other and both seem to be a function of improved nutrition.

Donald I. Templer. "Biological correlates of northern-southern Italy differences in IQ". Intelligence, 2012.

PISA Test Score Gap Closing

More evidence against Richard Lynn's Italian "IQ" study. The achievement test scores he used to "measure" intelligence have since improved dramatically in Southern Italy, which is rapidly catching up to the North.

Recent results of international assessment programs (e.g., PISA) have shown a large difference in high school students' performance between northern and southern Italy. On this basis, it has been argued that the discrepancy reflects differences in average intelligence of the inhabitants of regions and is associated with genetic factors (Lynn, 2010a, 2012). This paper provides evidence in contrast to this conclusion by arguing that the use of PISA data to make inferences about regional differences in intelligence is questionable, and in any case, both PISA and other recent surveys on achievement of North and South Italy students offer some results that do not support Lynn's conclusions. In particular, a 2006-2009 PISA data comparison shows a relevant decrease in the North-South difference in only three years, particularly evident in the case of a single region (Apulia). Other large surveys (including INVALSI-2011) offer different results; age differences suggest that schooling could have an important role.

Cornoldi et al. "Problems in deriving Italian regional differences in intelligence from 2009 PISA data". Intelligence, 2013.

Rebuttal to Richard Lynn's Reply

Here's yet another critique of Richard Lynn's work on Italian IQ. After reiterating the main arguments against his initial study, it focuses on data included in his reply to the first round of criticism, exposing the usual questionable methods we've come to expect from him, and providing new evidence that there are no significant differences in intelligence between north and south.

1.2. Differences in achievement not in intelligence

Lynn's (2010a) estimate of IQ was based on the 2006 British PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), an internationally standardized assessment administered to 15 year olds in schools, that found higher scores for students in northern Italy when compared to students in the south. PISA tests, however, were developed to measure achievement and not intelligence. In fact, the aim of PISA is to measure "how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society"....

Nevertheless, Lynn (2010a) uses achievement tests as "proxies for intelligence" (p. 95) adopting the logic that educational attainment and intelligence are highly correlated (from r=0.5 to r=1.0) across nations (Lynn & Meisenberg, 2010; Lynn & Mikk, 2007). However, in his studies it is not clear what kind of IQ tests have been used, and the other factors affecting achievement such as school quality, sociocultural level, and so on, are not controlled.

1.3. Correlation relationships discussed as causality relationships

It is widely known and accepted that a correlation coefficient describes the degree of relationship between two variables. However, two variables may correlate highly, but they may be different from each other. It is also possible that changes in the variables being studied are influenced by some other unobserved variable. Finally, correlation does not assume causality.

Against such universally shared methodological rules, Lynn (2010a) discusses association among variables as if they are equivalent or in a simple unilinear causal relationship.

[...]

1.5. Measuring intelligence using unvalidated tests

In his more recent paper, Lynn (2010b) reports further evidence of the lower IQs of southern Italians. The first is the report of an intelligence test given to a sample of 50,000 individuals who self-administered the test over the internet on www.sitozero.it. This is a commercial site with an inadequate description of the psychological tests used, with a considerable amount of advertisements and without any control of scientific and methodological issues. We do not consider these non-scientific data to be suitable for making assumptions about IQs.

1.6. Intelligence scores and Flynn effect

Lynn (2010b) uses data from several studies on Raven's test (Pruneti, 1985; Pruneti, Fenu, Freschi, & Rota, 1996; Tesi & Young, 1962) and Cattell Culture Fair test (Buj, 1981; Pace & Sprini, 1998). None of the studies used the same age groups and none were aimed at comparing IQs across regions of Italy.

Moreover, Lynn (2010b) did not consider the calculation of IQs made by the authors, but rather he recalculated the IQ scores in light of the well known and controversial (Colom, Lluis-Font & Andrés-Pueyo, 2005) Flynn effect (2007), described as a general increase of intelligence scores over the world in the last 50 years. So, for instance, an IQ of 99 collected in 1960, was increased by 4 points considering the Flynn effect = 4 of the Italian IQ in the years 1960-79.

Such procedure is questionable, as also Hagan, Drogin, and Guilmette (2008) pointed out. Indeed, different studies demonstrated that the Flynn effect is concentrated in the lower half of the normal distribution or in undeveloped countries (Colom et al., 2005), whereas a possible stagnation of IQ scores in developed ones is currently under debate (Teasdale & Owen, 2005; 2008).

[...]

2. New evidence against the north-south differences in IQs

With the aim to contribute to the study of regional differences in IQs, we obtained two new sources of evidence based on the direct assessment of IQs in children of different Italian regions, using measures of intelligence that do not contain highly academic content.

[...]

Despite the minor differences between the studies, our results demonstrate quite clearly that raw scores [on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices] of children from Sicily are not lower than those [of children from the North and Central-South] reported by Cornoldi et al. (2010). On the contrary, they are sometimes higher. This result could be related to the fact that the children in our group were tested in group sessions, while children in Italian standardization scores (Belacchi et al., 2008) were tested both in group and individual administration. Belacchi et al. (2008), indeed, found mean raw scores significantly higher in group sessions administration than in individual administration. Moreover, the children in our group were selected for other research purposes, and did not include children with socio-cultural disadvantage or other type of behavioral or cognitive problems. The more extensive sample reported by Cornoldi et al. (2010), on the contrary, was collected with the aim of building norms, and it likely includes a more diverse sample of children coming from different urban and suburban areas, and showing different socio-cultural levels.

[...]

Naglieri et al. (submitted for publication) studied the differences between the psychometric qualities of the CAS [Cognitive Assessment System] for the Italian and US standardization samples. Although the goal of that study was not to make regional comparisons, they did report that there were no significant differences (F(1, 806)=2.19, p=.11) between the average CAS-Italian Full Scale standard scores (set at a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15) for students from the northern (M=100.5; SD=13.2), central (M=101.2; SD=11.9), and southern (M=103.1; SD=11.6) regions of Italy. The mean standard scores for the students in the north were only slightly lower than the mean for those in the south (effect size=.21). These results suggest that a test of intelligence that measures basic neuropsychological processes, and does not include academically laden verbal and quantitative tests, yields small differences between the regional groups. These findings also amplify the importance of measuring intelligence directly when comparing groups and argue against using reading, math and science test scores as "proxies for intelligence" (Lynn, 2010a).

[...]

5. General conclusions

Our examination of intelligence test score differences between the north and south of Italy led to results that are very different from those reached by Lynn (2010a). Our results demonstrate that by using intelligence tests to assess differences in ability rather than using achievement scores as a proxy for intelligence, children from the south of Italy did not earn lower scores than those from the north of Italy. Rather, they were even higher in Raven's CPM. However, we see no advantage in claiming that children in the south are "more intelligent" than children in the north, because these groups are different on a number of variables (e.g., environmental factors, educational influences, composition of the samples) that influence differences in test scores. We also disagree with Lynn's genetically-centered explanation of intelligence which denotes a fixed conception not only about intelligence but also about learning.

D'Amico et al. "Differences in achievement not in intelligence in the north and south of Italy: Comments on Lynn (2010a, 2010b)". Learning and Individual Differences, 2012.

Geography and North-South Disparities

Books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Botany of Desire, and discoveries like the impact of infectious disease on IQ and climate shifts on the fall of Rome, have shown what a huge role geography and environment play in shaping development and the course of history. Stanford economist Thomas Sowell describes this phenomenon at work in modern Italy, showing how socioeconomic and other disparities between North and South that are often attributed to behavioral or biological factors actually have deep roots in the lay of the land.

Arable land is both scarce and scattered in southern Italy, leading to many isolated settlements — contributing in turn to the linguistic and other cultural differences. Moreover, there are very few long navigable rivers to facilitate trade and communication. Such modern means of travel or communication as broadcasting, railroads, and airlines were of course not yet in existence, or were not yet significant in southern Italy, when the massive immigration to America was taking place. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, however, geographical isolation was still extreme in some southern Italians villages.

[...]

The climate and terrain of southern Italy contributed to its poverty. While the temperatures are relatively mild, rainfall is both low and concentrated in only a few months. The growing season is dry — "drought may endure for six months or more." When the rains finally come, they are torrential, causing erosion. The dryness during the growing season in turn limits the use of fertilizers. The impermeability of much of the hilly soil facilitates rapid water runoff when it does rain, and the deforestation of southern Italy's once heavily wooded areas adds to both erosion and the collection of water in stagnant pools, breeding malaria. Italy has been the most malarial country in Europe, and southern Italy more so than the rest of the country. In addition to the direct suffering and death caused by malaria, disease also exacted an economic toll. Because the most fertile lowlands were also the most malarial, peasants and agricultural workers lived up on hillsides in order to be away from the malaria-bearing mosquitoes at night, when they bite. This in turn meant that much of the day was spent going to and from home and work — often miles apart — instead of actually working.

While much of southern Italy is hilly and mountainous, the highlands are at just the wrong height for agricultural purposes. They are too high and rugged to be good cropland and too low to collect snow, which would melt and give a slow, steady runoff of water during the spring. In addition to lacking these advantages common in some other European countries, Italy also does not have its sod broken up by nature through successive freezes and thaws during the winter. The southern Italian farmer must perform the vital function of breaking up the soil entirely by his own efforts and that of his animals pulling the plow.

Italy's natural deficiencies are both agricultural and industrial. About three quarters of the land area of Italy consists of mountains and hills. Only about half of the land is arable, and most of that is in northern Italy. In the south, the mountains "reach so close to the sea that arable land is limited to mountain villages, high plateaus, or coastal plains" — the latter being generally "very narrow." Italy is also lacking in both the quantity and quality of coal and iron ore needed for producing iron and steel — a mainstay of modern industry.

History has added to the problems created by nature. Southern Italy was long a battleground for contending empires and dynasties, which fought back and forth across the Italian peninsula for centuries, going back at least as far as the Roman Empire. For two centuries during the Middle Ages, invasions were "frequent and almost annual." At various times, southern Italy was conquered by a variety of foreigners, including the Lombards, the Arabs, and the Normans. Massacres, pillage, rape, and enslavement were the common fate of the population.

[...]

Northern Italy has been better treated by both nature and man. The rain falls in the spring and summer, when it is needed for agriculture. It has "several rivers, whose waters are kept at a relatively steady level by melting Alpine snows," and those "provide considerable water and power for agriculture and industry." In addition, northern Italy has "a system of irrigation that has been nowhere excelled and rarely approached" — at least during the era of massive immigration to America. Northern Italian agriculture has been described as "luxuriant under cultivation," yielding "a notable variety of crops." Deforestation and other natural and man-made evils of the south were less prevalent in the north.

Thomas Sowell. Ethnic America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Related: Resources and Industry in the North

Another Richard Lynn Refutation

They just keep coming. The others can be found here.

As stated at the outset, the aim of this analysis is not to demonstrate that IQ in Southern Italy is the same or higher than that in the North. On the other hand, a simple statistical exercise, based on correlations among variables, such as that by Lynn, is far from conclusive. Recent studies have shown a significant statistical relationship (p-value = 0.008) between the presence of storks in the European continent and the birth rate (Matthews, 2000); an association which seems particularly remarkable in the case of Germany (Höfer et al. 2004). We know how hard it is to explain causality by means of statistical exercises and certainly causal relationships are not captured by simple statistical correlations.

Our previous discussion suggests a different relationship among the variables analyzed by R. Lynn and those collected in the present article. Allowing that school tests are representative of differences in IQ, we have seen that:

• they clearly show how the North-South difference in cognitive ability does not exist at the age of 7. The correlation between regional educational achievement (INVALSI) and regional per capita income becomes positive (0.44) at the age of 10, but is, however, considerably lower than that found through PISA test scores;
• the IQ-average income relationship did not exist in the past, although if it had derived from a genetic difference, it would consequently have done so;
• knowledge of genetic differences in Italy does not support Lynn's opinion that peoples from North Africa and the Near East strongly influenced the genetic structure of the Southern Italian population. Genetically, the influence of the Phoenicians and the Near East populations accounts for a very small fraction, while the predominant genetic influence derives from the long phase of Greek colonization.

The existence of differences in IQ, as revealed by school tests and other tests (supposing that these actually reveal "fundamental" diversities in intelligence), seems much better explained as being socially, economically and historically influenced rather than being genetically determined. Capabilities in problem solving are enhanced by a developing and stimulating environment, according to the so-called "Flynn effect".

In the past, the Southern Italian economy has at times been more advanced than the Northern one; for example during both the Roman antiquity and the high Middle Ages. Perhaps the North and the Centre were more advanced than the South in the late Middle Ages; although nothing certain can be said on the matter. The following decline of the Italian economy as a whole, from the late Middle Ages until the end of the 19th century, probably cancelled the existing economic differences. When per capita GDP diminishes and approaches the level of bare subsistence, differences among regions disappear. In the 19th century, Italy was a relatively backward country both in the North and the South. The statistical material available from the end of the 19th century onwards, does not actually indicate a deep North-South divide, in economic terms. The start of modern growth from then on affected the North much more than the South and economic disparity began to exist between the two parts of the country. In 1891 the North-South difference in per capita GDP was less than 10 percent; it was 20 percent on the eve of World War 1, and 45 per cent after World War 2. In 2010, per capita GDP in the South is about 60 percent that of the North. As ordinarily happens, relative backwardness implies the accumulation of adverse influences. While literacy and years of education grew in the North with respect to the South, infant mortality diminished much more quickly in the North than the South. Institutions, including families and schools, work much better in prosperity than backwardness. Estimates of IQ are likely to be higher where families, municipalities, provinces and regions invest more in education. Remarkable emigration from the South to the North, especially between 1950 and 1975, increased the North-South diversity since emigration, in Italy as elsewhere, is always selective. Since IQ registers education and years of schooling to a greater extent than intelligence, the relative position of the South compared to the North deteriorated in both the cultural environment and the economy more or less contemporaneously.

Daniele and Malanima. "Are people in the South less intelligent than in the North? IQ and the North-South disparity in Italy". Journal of Socio-Economics, 2011.

More Criticism of Richard Lynn

Italian researchers have really stepped up to publish refutations of Lynn's bogus IQ study. This one follows two papers last year as well as my own critique.

In his article "In Italy, North-South differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy," Richard Lynn claims to have found the reason causing the divergence between the Northern and the Southern regions of Italy. This article identifies the four main hypotheses formulated in his paper and presents significant evidence against each one of them. We claim that the evidence presented by the author is not sufficient to say that the IQ of Southern Italians is lower than the one of Northern Italians; that his analysis does not prove that there is any causal link between what he defines as IQ and any of the variables mentioned; that there is no evidence that the alleged differences in IQ are persistent in time and, therefore, attributable to genetic factors.

Felice and Giugliano. "Myth and reality: A response to Lynn on the determinants of Italy's North-South imbalances". Intelligence, 2011.

Richard Lynn Further Refuted

I had recently criticized Richard Lynn's flawed study on IQ in Northern and Southern Italy, and now Italian researchers Cornoldi et al. (2010) have published their own critique, which confirms what I said and predicted:

Working with data from the PISA study (OECD, 2007), Lynn (2010) has argued that individuals from South Italy average an IQ approximately 10 points lower than individuals from North Italy, and has gone on to put forward a series of conclusions on the relationship between average IQ, latitude, average stature, income, etc. The present paper criticizes these conclusions and the robustness of the data from which Lynn (2010) derived the IQ scores. In particular, on the basis of recent Italian studies and our databank, we observe that : 1) school measures should be used for deriving IQ indices only in cases where contextual variables are not crucial: there is evidence that partialling out the role of contextual variables may lead to reduction or even elimination of PISA differences; in particular, schooling effects are shown through different sets of data obtained for younger grades; 2) in the case of South Italy, the PISA data may have exaggerated the differences, since data obtained with tasks similar to the PISA tasks (MT-advanced) show smaller differences; 3) national official data, obtained by INVALSI (2009a) on large numbers of primary school children, support these conclusions, suggesting that schooling may have a critical role; 4) purer measures of IQ obtained during the standardisation of Raven's Progressive Coloured Matrices also show no significant differences in IQ between children from South and North Italy.

Lynn's feeble reply, where he's basically forced to admit he's wrong:

Beraldo (this issue) and Cornoldi, Belacchi, Giofre, Martini, and Tressoldi (2010) (CBGMT) have eight criticisms of my paper (Lynn, 2010) claiming that the large north-south differences in per capita income in Italy are attributable to differences in the average levels of intelligence in the populations. CBGMT give results for seven data sets for IQs in the north and south of Italy. All of these show that IQs are higher in the north than in the south, although the differences are not as great as those I calculated. Other criticisms to the effect that the PISA tests are not measures of intelligence are refuted. The results of two further studies are given that confirm that IQs in the north of Italy are approximately 10 IQ points higher than in the south.

The other critique mentioned there is Sergio Beraldo (2010), which focuses mostly on Lynn's claims about economic differences.

Refuting Richard Lynn's Italian "IQ" Study

Controversial psychologist Richard Lynn, who looks at IQ and its correlates, has published a study claiming to show regional (North-South) differences in intelligence within Italy, which he attempts to correlate with achievement and attribute to admixture. The guy's been called just about every name in the book, and he can now add Padanian Nordicist to that list.

Intelligence

Generally speaking, Lynn is not to be trusted. He's been caught numerous times falsifying and manipulating data to fit his conclusions (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here), and it looks like he's up to his old tricks again.

This time around, he's not even using actual IQ data, but the proxy of scores on reading, math and science tests administered to 15-year-olds (PISA 2006). So he's attempting to quantify innate general intelligence by looking at the academic performance of school kids, a measure that to a large extent involves learned knowledge and other factors. Indeed, while some researchers report a strong correlation between general intelligence and educational attainment, one of Lynn's own sources, Deary et al. (2007), addressing two of his other sources, suggests that caution should be exercised when attempting to equate the two:

There are various possible causes of the cognitive ability-educational achievement association. Bartels et al. (2002b) found a strong genetic correlation between cognitive ability (measured at 5, 7, 10, and 12 years) and educational achievement at age 12. In an overview, Petrill and Wilkerson (2000) concluded that genetics and shared and non-shared environmental factors all influence intelligence and education, with genetics being important in the correlation between them, and non-shared environment being important in discrepancies between intelligence and educational attainments.

Whereas the correlations indicate that around 50% to 60% of the variance in GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] examination points score can be statistically explained by the prior g [general intelligence] factor, by the same token a large proportion of the variance is not accounted for by g. Some of the remaining variance in GCSE scores will be measurement error, but some will be systematic. Thus, non-g factors have a substantial impact on educational attainment. These may include: school attendance and engagement; pupils' personality traits, motivation and effort; the extent of parental support; and the provision of appropriate learning experiences, teaching quality, school ethos, and structure among other possible factors (Petrides, Chamorro-Premuzic, Frederickson, & Furnham, 2005; Strand, 2003).

But Lynn already knows the pitfalls of his approach. Finland had the highest score in Europe on the 2006 PISA tests, and using his method leads to a calculated IQ of 107, yet he reports Finns' IQ as being just 97. Romanians' PISA score is near the very bottom of Europe, leading to an estimate of 85, though their measured IQ is in fact 94 according to Lynn, just three points lower than that of Finns. With discrepancies like that, there's absolutely no reason to trust his calculated IQs of around 100 and 90 for Northern and Southern Italians. Clearly, PISA scores are not a good substitute for IQ.

Then, to try to prove that disparities in intelligence are long-standing, and therefore genetically based, he uses literacy as another (questionable) proxy for IQ. But whereas for other correlates like stature and infant mortality he includes data from the past and present to show that the North-South gap has remained fairly stable, for literacy he only includes data from 1880, when it was extremely large (55% vs. 20%, on average). Obviously, he wants to hide the fact that the gap has been closing steadily since then, and by the 21st century, literacy among Italians under the age of sixty-five was 99.7% in the North and 99% in the South (Istat 2001).

Achievement

Lynn goes on to attempt to correlate his fake IQs with achievement. The primary measure he uses is per capita income, which is double in the North what it is in the South. His source is the Italian Statistical Office, but he should be aware that figures for the South's economic performance are greatly underestimated because the official statistics fail to take into account a large underground economy there, according to Burnett and Vaccara (1999):

But the third factor, somewhat alleviating the second, is the existence of a far vaster private sector than ever shows up in the economic statistics. The size of the lavoro nero sector and the black market in the South clearly exceeds that of any other EU region.... In Calabria, with its dire employment figures, 84 percent of the families own their own home. What such anomalies must mean is that real income in Calabria is far higher than what is "on the books." Many among the vast numbers of officially unemployed are, in fact, partly or fully employed. They are earning no social benefits, but they are earning the daily lire that keep their families afloat. [...] A very large part of the South's hidden labor is made up of entrepreneurs, sometimes also employing black labor, and existing themselves outside official recognition, taxation, protection, control, or counting. A recent analysis concludes that "there exists in several zones of the Mezzogiorno [Southern Italy] a whole fabric of small and very small businesses that escape every census, but that work and make profits, share among themselves a serious level of production, export to other regions [of Italy] and abroad." [...] This massive sector skews all the statistics. It means that the GDP for the Italian South (and for Italy as a whole) is far from accurate. And the unemployment figures do not reflect reality.

Then, with the same goal of establishing a pattern that extends far back in time, he also looks at historical achievement, citing Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. But here again he plays fast and loose with the data. He adds up Murray's "significant figures" for Italy from 1400-1950 and divides them into "North", "Center" and "South" based on their origins. Almost all of them (187 out of 236) come from the "North". However, he explains that he uses the 42nd and 41st lines of latitude as borders, which are, respectively, just north of Rome and just north of Naples. So more than half of the country is put into the "North" category, while the "Center" gets flattened down and pushed into the territory of the "South" (click here to see what that looks like). This is a shameless and transparent ploy by Lynn to hugely inflate the number of significant figures from the "North" and reduce the number elsewhere in the country.

But perhaps even worse, he ignores the main finding of Murray's book, which is that achievement has been concentrated in just a few places, and Southern Italy is but one of many "low-achievement" areas throughout Europe, along with some of the northernmost regions in Italy:


As you can see — and as Murray points out in his book — the highest ranking region is Tuscany, which would normally be considered part of Central Italy. Ironically, Lynn doesn't even have PISA/IQ data for Tuscany, though its 1880 literacy rate isn't particularly high. So he's basically attributing the unique genius of that region to the brainpower of regions that have not produced the same level of genius.

Admixture

Finally, Lynn offers his "explanation" for the disparities in fake IQ, which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be admixture from the Middle East and North Africa, where (according to him) IQs are in the range of 80-84. As you might expect from someone with an agenda and little knowledge of genetics, he references a lot of old studies that use single or small numbers of loci and don't directly address the question of admixture. One of them has "Neolithic demic diffusion in Europe" in its title, yet he stupidly follows the citation with references to historical groups like Phoenicians and Arabs.

Recent genome-wide studies have been able to detect and quantify admixture like never before. Li et al. (2008), using more than 600,000 autosomal SNPs, identify seven global population clusters, including European, Middle Eastern and Central/South Asian. Contrary to Lynn's claims, it's actually the overachieving Tuscans who have a small amount of non-European admixture and not the underachieving Sardinians:


López Herráez et al. (2009) typed the same samples at close to 1 million SNPs and analyzed them in a Western Eurasian context, identifying a number of subclusters. This time, all of the European samples show some minor admixture. Among the Italians, Tuscany still has the most, and Sardinia has a bit too, but so does Lombardy (Bergamo), which is even farther north:

Conclusion

The bottom line is, we don't know the average IQs for different regions in Italy, which is why Richard Lynn had to resort to making them up. And while Southern Italians are likely to be a few points lower than Northern Italians — as the Irish and Scottish are a few points lower than the English — there's absolutely no reason to believe that North and South would be separated at their extremes by almost a full standard deviation. Lynn certainly hasn't proven anything of the kind with this ridiculous study, nor has he provided any valid explanations for such a disparity.

Updates

Since I wrote this article, a number of studies have been published that refute Lynn and confirm what I've said:

• Cornoldi et al. (2010) and Beraldo (2010)
• Felice and Giugliano (2011)
• Daniele and Malanima (2011)
• Robinson et al. (2011)
• D'Amico et al. (2012)
• Templer (2012)
• Cornoldi et al. (2013)

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Richard Lynn. "In Italy, north-south differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy". Intelligence, 2010.