the case of the missing irish iq data

fierce tiger pointed out (thanks, 猛虎!) that ron unz writes:

“Lynn refutes my evidence for a low Ireland IQ during the 1970s by referring me to the more extensive data in his latest book, saying it debunks my claim. However, when I examined the Ireland IQs in that book (p. 402), I discovered that he had inexplicably failed to include the massive 1972 study of 3,466 students which established an Irish IQ of 87 and which had appeared in all of his previous books. When I asked him why he had excluded the largest early Irish IQ study, he said he had no answer, and that perhaps ‘this omission was a mistake.'”

well, that is weird, i agree.

i still wanna know, though — has anybody ever looked at the actual data from this 1972 study? i mean, evaluated the research — the testing and how it was conducted and so on. i’m not saying that the finding (average iq of the irish in 1972 was 87) is wrong. i just want to know if anybody’s — you know — double-checked it. did richard lynn actually check it personally?

as far as i can figure out, the only people who have seen the original data are the authors of the master’s thesis for which the data was collected — one enda byrt and one peter edward gill — plus jonn raven (note: not john c. raven). the data has not been published anywhere afaics — only in the master’s thesis itself, a copy of which can be found in the reference section in the library of a university in ireland. i discovered the reference for it in this paper by john raven: The Raven’s Progressive Matrices: Change and Stability over Culture and Time [opens pdf]. (<< you might want to read that paper, ron, if you haven’t already.) i can’t find any academic traces of enda byrt, but gill seems to be teaching at a university in sweden.

here’s what john raven had to say about the irish data in his paper:

pgs. 5-6: “In 1972, Byrt and Gill (1973), working with the author [i.e. john raven], collected data from a nationally representative sample of 3,464 primary school children ages 5 to 11 in the Republic of Ireland. The urban norms seemed to corresponded [sic] to the 1938 Ipswich norms, although the figures for the rural areas lagged behind.”

pg. 9: “[N]orms for rural and isolated communities are typically lower than others. The previously mentioned norms for the Republic of Ireland and Newfoundland can, in this context, be seen to confirm this.”

pg. 32: “Thorndike suggests that television may have had an effect [on rising scores, a la the flynn effect]. However television was widely available in Ireland when what can now be seen to be low Irish norms were collected.”

so, according to raven, the data was nationally representative and so should be ok. maybe it is. i would feel a little better about it, though, if it had been publically published somewhere so that others — people who had not been involved in the data collection — could’ve had a look at it.

who cares? well, an argument is only as good as the data on which it’s based, right? (that statement is gonna bite me in the *ss one day, i just know it! (~_^) ) was the average iq of the irish in 1972 really 87? i’m leaning towards maybe/probably, but i’m not certain about it because i don’t feel secure about the data.

another argument entirely is whether or not a score of 87 in 1972 tells us anything about the average iq of the irish in 1840. or 1890. don’t think ron can extrapolate backwards from that 1972 score. i mean, if the current scores for the irish are correct, and say we didn’t have any iq scores for the irish from the 1970s, we never would’ve guessed the score back then (in the ’70s) had been so low. (if, indeed, it was so low.)

i still think that my — and anatoly’s — suggestion that there was a ca. 130 year brain drain in ireland that resulted in that low score, which just happens to coincide with the lowest point in their population stats btw, is pretty good. i suppose ron will continue to ignore that possibility. that’s certainly his prerogative.

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