Is America smart enough? IQ and national productivity

National Review, April 15, 1991 by Daniel Seligman

3. In the third layer is a long list-it gets longer every year-of primary abilities. Some of these are thought of as particular forms of the broad verbal and visuospatial talents, but some others, like a memory for musical rhythms, are viewed as separate.

Back to the East-West differences, beginning at the top of the hierarchy. Lynn's first finding is that Japanese children are distinctly superior in g. At least, they are superior beginning around age six. At earlier ages, they fall short in g, apparently because they mature more slowly than Caucasian children. But after catching up, they pull steadily ahead; and on a scale where average American white children score 100, the Japanese score around 104 in the years between ten and sixteen.

In the second layer of the hierarchy, the picture is mixed. In the verbal factor, Japanese children are no standouts. They again start out behind their American counterparts in the very early years, but this time they do not catch up until around age nine or ten; furthermore, they do not then proceed to pull ahead of American children, but instead continue to score around 100 on average. Lynn believes that they are actually less talented verbally than American children. Many of the verbal skills can be raised by intensive study, so the apparent parity after age nine probably reflects the superiority of the Japanese educational system.

In the visuospatial factor Japanese superiority is discernible as early as age four and a half. With white Americans again normed at 100, the Japanese score around 105 in the years between ten and sixteen.

In the third layer, the specific skills break down about as you might expect. The Japanese are relatively weak on most verbal tests, but they are generally outstanding on tests measuring drawing ability, speed of perception, and thinking about objects being moved around in space. (In case you are wondering, they do about as well as Americans on musical rhythm.) Lynn finds that "These characteristics are also present among Mongoloids in the United States and, so far as the evidence goes, in the three Far East nations of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan."

The general rule, then, is that the East Asians excel at visuospatial tasks but are much weaker in the verbal sphere. Footnote to the rule: Lynn's Mongoloid-Caucasoid differences are somewhat analogous to (although greater than) male-female differences in Western societies-where men on average do far better than women in math and science, while women generally do better in verbal skills. Further footnote: American men seem about as good at the visuospatial tasks as East Asian women.

At Their Mother's Knee?

WHERE DID these East-West differences come from? Since so many of the ability differences are discernible in very young children, it is just about impossible to serve up a purely environmental answer to that question. Lynn himself believes in a mostly genetic answer, and has proposed an imaginative evolutionary explanation.

Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile "selection pressure" for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn's 1987 paper refers to "the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain." These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world's best visuospatial abilities.