America gets a lot of stick (mostly from smug foreigners like me) about its system of unaccredited, diploma-farm style universities, which churn out meaningless bits of paper to the likes of Gillian McKeith so that they can call themselves “Doctor” (well, until the Advertising Standards Authority slaps them down for it anyway).
Good news this week, then, in the shape of the QS World University Rankings for 2010, which show that the top seventeen universities in the world are all in the US or the UK, and while the UK holds number one spot and four out of the top seven, the USA holds an impressive thirteen out of the top seventeen spots.
It’s pretty well established that the more intelligent and educated a person is, the less likely they are to believe in God. Here, have a graph:
IQ versus belief in God.
I wonder if Americans realise how enigmatic their country is to outsiders? For me, a secular European, there is just too much religious power there, but travel East and most Arab nationals would probably argue that the US is far to secular. Damned if they do, doomed if they don’t.
Back to the point then: Should the US seek to do as other nations have done and make the words “university” and “college” protected titles? Should they regulate who can and cannot give out degrees? Some states already do, for example the recent case of the Southern Baptist university in Texas which was denied the right to award an accredited MSc (for which I have been unable to find a link), but would it improve the education system in the US to do it nationally?
Most important of all: Could denying apologist institutions the ability to award unaccredited “degrees” force religious families to send their kids to institutions which teach facts instead of myths and so open their minds?
This is an interdependend relation.
If a title can be archieved through any fair and unfair means in any institute or through any person, then it does not have any worth.
If however (as i would claim) a title does hold a value in the world, then it ought to be protected.
Sadly not protecting a title doesnt automatically reduce its value in the eyes of normal people that simply are unaware of how someone has gotten it.
There is something wrong with the chart. IQ scores are, by definition, centered around 100. So what happened to all of the people with IQs above 110.
I suspect that somewhere along the line someone messed with the chart and shifted everything down to make it look like only stupid people believe in God. Even if you believe that, it would be disingenuous, at best, to manipulate the chart to show it.
The graph doesn’t focus on individuals; it’s a plot of the national average IQ versus the percentile who don’t believe in God for (I think) 139 countries. So I disagree: There’s no reason to believe that the data has been manipulated, but perhaps I should have labelled the graph better.
This article, and especially the accompanying graph, are sadly lacking in the quality one expects of good skeptics. First of all, the title is “Education Versus Religion,” but the graph compares intelligence, not education, to belief in god. Most would contend that these two are not in perfect, or even close, correspondence. Intelligence tests as measures of anything were mostly discredited thirty years ago, in any case. Then we learn that the blue dots represent something like national average of intelligence.
I think Custoador’s comments would be more appropriate, perhaps, in a Mensa magazine.
Saying that the two are not related is like saying that it’s coincidence that fish like to swim in water instead of air.
Would you like some evidence for my position?
I think I can finally sum up what I meant like this:
Education level is something you can change.
IQ is not.
Therefore, to interchange the two to prove a point is false.
I disagree. Your own point about how third-world nations do in IQ tests prove you wrong. You very obviously CAN alter IQ and education both.
It could be that third world countries are full of evolutionarily inferior people and that’s why the countries suck.
Another explanation is that most IQ tests are not geared towards third world countries, and this is pretty important. While an American not knowing the name of our highest office(president) reflects a poor iq(and this is how parts of IQ tests work, although there will obviously be multiple questions), someone living in Italy not knowing wouldn’t be such a bad reflection. After all, I don’t know the highest office in the Czech Republic. I guess its president, but that’s just a guess.
So if there aren’t any IQ tests designed for third world countries, then of course they will perform poorly on an American test.
So you’re saying (or the graph is saying) that there are some 12 countries in the world where the average IQ is 70 or less? Really? Where the average person is borderline deficient? Are these, like, Borneo, New Guinea, and sub-Sarahan Africa? How do you even test the IQ of aboriginal people, who have had no exposure to Western culture, where the IQ tests tend to be constructed?
There are simply too many confounding dependent variables to make meaningful global correlations: nutrition, educational opportunity (for even high-IQ individuals), heterogeneity of population. I have seen other studies, normalized to cultures/countries, that are far more convincing. This one does not help, and citng it, frankly, is a little pathetic.
I looked at this data a couple of years ago, so my info is a little out date, but the countries with estimated IQs below 70 were: Equatorial Guinea (59), Sao Tome and Principe, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Guinea, Senegal, The Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo (Kinshasa), Zimbabwe, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Central African Repl., Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Mali,Togo, Benin, Angola (69).
I think you have a point about nutrition and other factors affecting IQ: but so what? The data describes what IS, not what should be if the playing field was level. Perhaps better nutrition would improve IQ and reduce religiosity: wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Sure, the data describes what IS (with a degree of skepticism about the validity of developed-world IQ tests administered to third-world people), but only by a single dependent variable. It implies a causal relationship between low IQ and religiosity, when in fact, as you agree, it is at least possible, maybe likely, that other factors co-cause low IQ and religiosity.
I’m just saying there is plenty of evidence within the developed world to link intelligence and atheism. We don’t need to be pointing and snickering at Equatorial Guineans to make us feel superior.
In theory accreditation is already protected by the state. Obviously that does not in itself solve the problem as non accredited schools are able to award meaningless “degrees”, and “not protecting a title doesn’t automatically reduce its value in the eyes of normal people”. And unfortunately accreditation is a system based on a school meeting a checklist of certain things. Religious schools have long since figured out how to meet that checklist without sacrificing their goal of religious indoctrination.
True, but does that mean that a religious school can’t provide a worthwhile education along with whatever religious indoctrination may or may not occur? We aren’t considering some sort of “skeptics accreditation,” are we? Something that only checks to see if a school demonstrates a “proper” attitude toward religious nonsense, but completely leaves out any consideration of actual academic merit?
The way I see it, accreditation checks for something very specific and narrow, and that’s the way it should be.
Mike S, well done for the heads up about the graph. Any random and significantly large sample should get close to equal numbers above and below 100 IQ, and should show a lot of people above 110. The graph has obviously been manipulated and in a childishly obvious way.
Any chance of a link to the original research results?
Certainly, please feel free to deconstruct it :-)
It says page not found – do you have another link? Thanks!
No worries, I’ve found a Word version of it online.
Most universities & colleges are regulated and must be accredited to get federal funding. Unfortunately, I think the ‘accreditatORrs’ give in to much pressure from the religious groups that continue to hold power & wealth. Some ‘universities’ are accredited and should NOT be. There should be such creature as a “degree in creation science” or similar. Further, *any* physical science degree from somewhere like Liberty, Oral Roberts, or Regent Universities, etc is a farce. If I were an employer I wouldn’t hire someone from any those type of universities. Those institutions have an agenda and I do not trust them to teach the truth, only the truth as they see it.
No worse than some countries where you just pay the college a little more than the tuition cost and get a degree. Or the ones that advertise a degree for $500 USD on the train.
- Grew up in the FSU and although things are getting better in some places you can still get a diploma without having to attend any classes.
Back on topic the USA education system needs far more fixing than just the whole University and College title thing. (See the Texas textbook fiasco and NCLB)
On: The last sentence.
I definitely believe that, being exposed to such material as evolution, would cause some believers to start asking the right questions. After listening to a few christian acquaintances though, I found that some are quite… strong in their faith.
An older Christian man (nice, smart engineer in his 50′s) and a Christian summer student ( 20, farm-girlish, in university for doing “head-stands” or something) were talking about evolution. The girl mentioned that they teach it in university, and that her parents had told her just to learn it and tell the prof what he wants to hear (not that that last part is rare by any means). The older man agreed and then started talking about how “Flawed” evolution is and how when different creatures have been created or mirco-organisms change to adapt to new conditions (or medicines) that no genetic mutations have occurred, but instead that the genetic information was already there and only active in certain creatures.
The last part isn’t too important, the main point I have is just that some people have “the blinders on” like you wouldn’t believe (expression of course, I’m sure you can believe it =P). It’s almost kind of admirable how some people can go through all of university (a real one too) and only think of evolution as a theory, or something untrue. Probably more impressive for people in Biological Sciences though.
I once had a man tell me, “when I see a dog evolve into a cat, THEN I’ll believe in evolution”. It’s like banging your head into a brick wall.
Funny, because if I saw that, I’d stop believing in evolution, as it would constitute evidence AGAINST it.
Education != IQ
I have a 160+ IQ but no college degree. I earn more than most with college degrees as well. I continually reject the notion that one has to go “to university” to be smart or get ahead in life.
There is a strong correlation between IQ, education and earning potential. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s certainly an indication. Oh, and the highest IQ score on a standard scale is 161.
It depends on which exact IQ test you use weather the max is 161. As I understand it on a standard scale there really is no max, as its supposedly normalized across the population. I could be wrong, but your comment comes off as awfully snarky anyway.
The fact remains that you should not start an article with a title of “Education vs. Religion” and then compare IQ to religion. IQ != Education. Its related, but not equivalent.
Claiming you have an IQ of 160 is ridiculous. Which internet test did you take multiple times to achieve this number? Why have you chosen to not pursue any higher education despite your obvious supreme intellect? Why are bothering with us peons when your IQ is so preposterously high?
Yes I took an anonymous Internet test that promised me a free ipod if I signed up for only 5 separate credit card offers, seemed like a sweet deal to me.
It was a test given in the 70s when I was 5, haven’t taken one since. I do however doubt the validity of the whole IQ test process anyway and the only reason I brought it up in the first place is because the premise of the article was “Education vs Religion” then the author switched to using IQ as if the two are interchangeable. My entire argument is that they are not, and no amount of ad hominem attacks you fling using an alternate anonymous id or otherwise is going to invalidate that statement.
For the record, I don’t dispute the accuracy of the graph, in fact I fit in the model as I am also an atheist. My point is only that Education and IQ are not interchangeable.
Your blanket assertion is pwned by the facts, I’m afraid. There is an extremely strong correlation between IQ and education. A thirty point shift in the average between well educated and uneducated, to be exact. I’m not arguing causation, however my use of the two variables interchangably is entirely justified because they are so strongly related.
In first world countries, perhaps it is permissible, if crude. Your “facts” that “pwn” my assertion however are centered around Oregon. However, follow my logic here.
You state:
Education is inversely related to the likeliness of an individual being Religious.
Countries with a higher percentage of greater learning facilities have a lower percentage of religious people.
THEREFORE those with higher IQs are less likely to be religious.
Don’t you see how your argument falls apart here? You’re drawing too many conclusions based on relative arguments. IQ is a normalized distribution of a population. Are you arguing then that a nation like Iran which is 90%+ religious is filled with those with low IQs? Can you not see how that is an invalid statement to make?
See the problem is that I agree with your original premise. The more educated one is, the less likely they are to be religious. However, I totally disagree with your methods of proving it. IQ is NOT interchangeable with education, especially when you globalize the concept.
I wholeheartedly agree! So much of it just societal expection & the need for the ‘paper’ to be empolyable in this country. Nonsense.
However, I live in the religious south and for people around here a few university courses would at least get them out of the trailer park for an hour or two. These people will never get ahead in life w/o it.
And the fact that *most* of us don’t possess an IQ of 160 so we much do the ‘dance’ so to speak.
I’m aware of my many typos but too tired to fix ….
Aron, do you have a IQ of 160?
Or do you think you have a IQ of 160?
Because a lot of nutjobs use the claim that they were too smart for school or university so they stopped. Most of them think that they are smarter than all scientist together and all scientists are completely wrong.
It does not mean that they have a high IQ, they just don’t realize that they have a low IQ;
I must admit that my first reaction to people who quote their IQ is disbelief, even though I occasionally do the same thing myself :-)
You can buy a lot of worthless IQ tests online. Answer ten easy questions, pay $15, and you have a diploma saying your IQ is 150.
Coincidentally, it’s exactly similar to how diploma mills operate.
Its funny, you’d think I’d learn to just keep such things to myself, as any time I trot it out I’m met with disbelief, or accusations of falsehood. Its silly and pretentious and I’ve heard all the “Oh yeah buddy, well my dog scored 140+ on that internet exam you took as well.”
No. The reason I specifically phrase it as 160+ is thats what the test I was given at the age of 5 said. Verbatim. It did not list an exact number as I believe that specific test was only keyed to that number and I must have fallen off the end of the bell curve so to speak.
Do I believe this makes me superior to someone with a lesser IQ? No. Do I believe I deserve your scorn for mentioning this? Not at all. The only reason I brought it up was to say that formal education does not equal IQ, and because I used myself as the example it’s become a bit of a straw man argument, with people, having little to no knowledge of myself, accusing me of being a liar simply because what I stated is incredibly rare.
I merely wanted to demonstrate that comparing Formal Education to IQ is insulting to those of us with high IQs who opted out of formal education. It is as if you are saying to us, “You don’t have a formal education, therefore you cannot be intelligent.”
Can you not see how that is insulting? Can you not see how it’s degrading? Many, many smart people did not have a formal education. Earnest Hemingway had no formal education, would you flame those claiming he had a high IQ? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs … these guys make more money than anyone on this forum combined, would you say they “missed out” because they didn’t attend university? I think not.
Yes, I realize that these are statistical outliers, and that any group has them. I’m saying, however, that though formal education is a good indication of a higher IQ, the two are not interchangeable. After all, George W. Bush is on the alumnus rolls at Harvard and Yale, yet Abraham Lincoln didn’t even attend a community college. I don’t think there are many who would claim that Bush’s IQ was higher than Lincoln’s.
Still, continue to attack me directly without actually addressing the argument at hand if you wish, I guess it only helps to prove my point.
It’s interesting that you’ve just admitted I’m right but done so in a combative way that makes it sound as if it’s me who’s contending with you….
– Me.
– Me.
– You.
Oh, and please show me where I have attacked you personally or insulted you? Pretty sure I haven’t done that to anybody today…
Well Custador, unless you are also Olaf, I wasn’t accusing you of attacking me. Merely of being snarky, which is evident.
I was not attacking, I was checking by just asking.
IQ 160+ means you are way smarter than me, it is naturally for me to test your claim. Is you level indeed higher than mine or just a fantasy.
Most people that are smarter than me find it funny that I challenge them. And then they bombard me with stuff that is indeed high level and correct when I cross check it with resources.
A high IQ at age 5 and stopped education does not mean that you are trained and educated at high level. Unless you educate yourself with the stuff that you would have learned in universities. You could have huge gaps in your basic knowledge. For examples maths or physics.
Doesn’t necessarily mean I’m smarter than you, means I’m a better test taker than you, and thats all.
In fact it presents itself with a whole list of other problems. Do you know what being told you’re a genius at a young age does to a kid? In my case, it did no good. Gave me nothing but trouble in school as I instantly “knew” I was smarter than everyone, so I became academically lazy. I could pass any test you put in front of me, but I refused to do homework because I thought it was unnecessary busy work. Thus, my grades suffered because I did no homework. No scholarship. Poor family. No formal University training, and frankly a slower maturation rate.
I am employed at a high level where most around me have PhDs and I have no degree. I did this mostly by self education and intelligence alone, but it took a long time to come to grasp with who I am. Relating “Education” to “IQ” interchangeably has always been one of my pet peeves. I know people that are far better educated than I’ll ever be who are middle of the road IQ wise. I also know others with high IQs that are complete and utter morons. You may believe me to be one, I’m sorry I ever mentioned it to be honest. Because mentioning it only caused people to focus on “hate this guy” than the actual argument which I think is sound. IQ and Education are often found to be correlated, at a very high correlation factor, in fact, I’ll admit. But Education level and Income level are in fact at a higher correlation level. So the title of the article “Education vs. Religion” would have been more relevant had he included a graph of Income vs. Religion. You see?
I guess maybe its pedantic but I am trying to be clear, IQ is who you are, Education is what you are, you shouldn’t use the terms interchangeably.
In case you are wondering, I do not have a degree in the job I am doing. I do have a degree in something completely different. :-)
And yes I do know that you are above average, you can sense it in your in the words and sentences you use.
I do fail tests because of my dyslexia. In a lot of cases I did not understand the question completely because of the wordplay.
You sound insecure about your lack of education, I assume.
Hard not to be when the world generally believes that. You are right, you don’t have to be educated to be intelligent, but are you really going to argue that education does not generally make people more intelligent?
Besides even that, education vs intelligence wasn’t even the point of this post. I know it may insinuate that, but you just seem more sensitive to it.
Also, a person with an IQ of 160 would know better than to use that assertion (on the internet) like that to try and nullify someone’s claim. A website of Skeptical people tends to be SKEPTICAL.
(And yes, I can’t help but be a jerk about that)
Education does not raise IQ scores. If it does, then the IQ test itself is flawed. The definition and purpose of the IQ test would be invalid if Education influenced IQ. Your IQ is your IQ, no matter where you went to college.
Also, I don’t suffer from a lack of education, therefore I couldn’t feel insecure about it. Just because I didn’t attend a formal university does not mean that I did not receive an education.
How many people do you know with high IQs? Most of us are really idiots, especially when it comes to socializing, especially on the internet. Just saying…
How low is your EQ, really as low as an idiot? But I don’t doubt what you say ” Most of us are really idiots”.
I don’t know about my EQ.
You really don’t have to answer.
Nice covert little insult.
“Most of us are idiots”
Holy crap! What a profound statement. You MUST have a high IQ.
I know many of them, I work with them.
Some of them are a bit eccentric but in now way are these idiots.
They are not bad in socializing, they just have a different level of education so they socialize best with people at equal level.
The only high IQ idiots I noticed are those with a simulated IQ because they bought their university degree. Or has brain damage because of alcoholism.
So, when you were 5, you were as smart as the average 8-year-old. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your adult IQ is also 160.
I wonder if Americans realise how enigmatic their country is to outsiders? For me, a secular European, there is just too much religious power there, but travel East and most Arab nationals would probably argue that the US is far to secular. Damned if they do, doomed if they don’t.
It’s a mistake to think of America as a cultural monolith. If a secular person were to visit New England or the Pacific Northwest, they would find it approximately as secular in character as the average European country, maybe excepting the odd Blue Law that would require a local historian to know the origin of. On the other hand, if you were to go to the South and the Midwest, it would be more scarily religious than you describe. These forces are probably most in tension in the Mid-Atlantic states (New York and Pennsylvania, especially), who can’t really decide whether they want to embrace religion or a more secular path.
There is also a huge differential everywhere between the religiosity of rural areas and the rather more secular cities.
I think it’s worth mentioning that even within those regions, there is a great deal of variability. For instance Minnesota and Wisconsin tend to be more secular than say Oklahoma or Nebraska.
Asheville in North Carolina where I live, is one of the most progressive towns in the south. And in NC we have some great universities like UNC, Duke, NCSU. Wake Forest is a good school but is Baptist affiliated (but surprisingly benignly so). But there are pockets of southern hell here that still hold us back.
Here’s the problem with this graph, as I see it. (And yes, I read the article from which it is taken.) What we are dealing with are a whole bunch of correlated factors whose respective causal relationships are more or less left out of your analysis (or the analysis of the paper.) Incidentally, I can see why they left this un-analyzed, but it means we have to be careful when we draw conclusions based on it.
Basically, there are at least 5 factors in play here, and probably many more than that. First, incidence of religious belief. Second, IQ. Third, education. Fourth, major industrialization. Fifth, percentage of rural v. urban population. (For now, I’ll assume that the IQ is somehow correcting for non-western cultures, which seems unlikely, but whatever.)
These are all pretty clearly correlated; that’s apparent, interesting, and fair enough. No arguments. The problem is that with this many inter-related factors, determining causality is likely to be impossible. A basic example of what we can’t determine from this information is that “industrialization causes higher IQ,” or “religion causes lower IQ.” That’s obviously fallacious, and you aren’t making that leap. For this, I applaud you.
However, we also can’t say that “industrialization is correlated with higher IQ,” at least, not in a vacuum. Industrialization (or religion) is correlated with all the factors we’re considering. I couldn’t validly assert, for example, that IQ is in fact correlated with rural v. urban population trends specifically, because those population trends only occur in places with high degrees of industrialization, which is correlated to more education, etc.
The only way to separate these factors enough to assign individual correlates to them would be some kind of experimental setup. With a well-designed experiment (or the fabulously lucky discovery of a primitive rural tribe with a high incidence of formal education) we could begin to figure out that (for example) IQ is completely independent of industrialization, but strongly correlated with urban and rural populations.
TL;DR version–
I don’t have any problems with the accuracy of that graph, but the information it actually gives us is more limited than it seems. Not only can’t we determine causation, we can’t even really say much more than “IQ, urbanization, industrialization, education, and non-belief in God are correlated,” or even narrow down that list of relevant factors at all.
Yes. To break it down.
Education is something you have.
IQ is something you are.
The two cannot be used interchangeably, no matter how strong of a correlation you can draw.
Education is something you have.
IQ is something you are.
The two cannot be used interchangeably, no matter how strong of a correlation you can draw.
I certainly agree that the two are separate and not fungible, but I disagree with the assumption (long-held but challenged by recent research) that IQ is an immutable quantity.
Especially childhood IQ, which is a ratio of your age, and the average at at which someone would be expected to score as you did. So, if you’re a consistent three years ahead of your peers, you’d have an IQ of 200 at age 3, 150 at age 6, and so on.
True, but I meant the slightly more controversial claim that adult IQ is a mutable quantity.
You know, I’m leaning towards the position that saying “education can’t make you smarter” is like saying “exercise can’t make you stronger”.
Ooh, I like that.
Thanks. I just came up with it.
But I’m sure I’m not the first.
I see it as the lower the IQ the more likely one is to be bamboozled in to the BS of religion. And yes there are exceptions of very smart people drinking the kool aid.
“Should they regulate who can and cannot give out degrees? ”
uh “they” do. Are you calling for more government regulation? As far as IQ goes – reminds me of two kids comparing biceps to see which one has the bigger muscle.
Which country is represented by the highest dot, where the IQ would be 108-109, yet only 12% do not believe in god? How about the intriguing dot siting on the 40% don’t believe line, with IQ about 85?
Which country is represented by the highest dot, where the IQ would be 108-109, yet only 12% do not believe in god?
The three candidates that come to mind (both with high industrial capacity/wealth and high religiosity) are Poland, Italy, and the US.
Singapore and Cuba
I would be very much in favor of that idea, especially if it shut down or substantially altered all of our Heald type trade schools. Those places are a real scam.