God makes you stupid, researchers claim:
Lynn and his two co-authors argue that average IQ is an excellent predictor of what proportion of the population are true believers, across 137 countries. They also cite surveys of the US Academy of Sciences and UK Royal Academy showing single-digit rates of religious belief among academics.
Well, I actually blogged this relationship years ago (December 2003 actually). It jumps out at you pretty clearly if you know the two traits and their international trends. I think that the causal factors which underly the relationship need to be qualified carefully; I do not believe that it is just high IQ leading to some inevitable skepticism. I think a psychological phenomenon such as religious belief should be modeled as a quantitative trait subject to a norm of reaction. So of late I've become more interested in the correlations of these traits which vary within a culture. I'm especially interested in the ~0.50 heritability that Thomas Bouchard found among twins separated at birth in regards to religious intensity.... I've placed the three tables I found in a pre-press form of the paper that is circulating below the fold.... Table 1. Decline in percentage holding religious belief, with age (Francis,1989)
Table 2. Declining belief Correlates with Age (sd =15.6)(Turner,1980)
AgeNBoysGirls
5-640087.996.0
11-1240079.684.1
15-1640055.770.4
* significant at p<.01 Table 3. Correlations between the National IQs and Religious Disbelief
AgeN
Belief(%)
R: Non-belief x IQ
1250 69.54 0.183
1350 66.10 0.110
1450 59.86 -0.113
1550 57.94 -0.354*
IQsN.CountriesNon-BelieversRange Non-BelieversR: Non-belief x IQ
64-108 137 10.69% <1% to 81% +0.60
64-86 69 1.95% <1% to 40% +0.16
87-108 68 16.99% <1% to 81% +0.54
