From INTELLIGENCE: THE MENSA
JOURNAL No. 97, MARCH 1967, p. 1.
By Nathaniel Weyl. For the past five years,
all Standard Two European, Coloured and Asiatic students in the Salisbury
District of Rhodesia (which contains over 50 per cent of the white population)
have been given South African group intelligence tests. Those scoring 130+ have
then been tested individually, using the latest international standardization
of the Terman-Merrill test.*
About 95 per cent of those scoring 130+ on
the group test did so on the individual test. The Terman-Merrill tests revealed
that about 7 per cent of the white children in the government schools of the
Salisbury district had IQs of 130 or better. This compares with about 2.5 per
cent in that range in the U.K. and the U.S. and about 3 per cent in New
Zealand. Group testing of pupils in privately operated schools indicated that
their inclusion would not have lowered the percentage of gifted children.
Elite
Thus, white Rhodesians are an elite element
within the English-speaking world in terms of psychometric intelligence. This
finding is reinforced by visual impressions. Salisbury whites appear larger,
healthier, more vigorous, alert and bright than London whites. Beatniks,
transvestites and obvious homosexuals are conspicuously absent.
Among the reasons offered for the
intellectual superiority of white Rhodesian children were:
(1). The Group Test is a much better
instrument than the subjective opinions of teachers for winnowing out gifted
children from the mass.
(2). Rhodesian policy is to exclude
immigrants who lack jobs, thus minimising the influx of unskilled, uneducated
and incompetent elements.
(3). Since the white minority must provide
managerial, scientific, professional and intellectual leadership for the
Africans as well as the Europeans, the demand for elite elements is enormous.
Rhodesian officials estimate that 15 per cent of their white population
consists of professionals and highly skilled technicians as against 10 per cent
in the case of white South Africans and only 6 per cent in the case of the
British. (The tests showed that the Coloured and Asiatic children made
quantitatively insignificant contributions to the 130+ IQ group.)
(4). Immigration to developing frontier
countries is probably positively selective for self-reliance and
intelligence.
Of the 800 or so white Rhodesian children
who scored 130 or better, no less than twelve were shown to have IQs in the
180+ range. This again is a multiplier of the normal IQ distribution.
Sensitive barometers
I should like to make two additional
comments on these test results, for which no Rhodesians bear any
responsibility:
First: Antony Bowl of Bulawayo complained
in a recent letter to Interim that Rhodesians tend to be
non-intellectual and evince practically no interest in Mensa. Surely Mensans
tend to be people with low boring points and one of the main reasons for
joining Mensa is to escape the society of tedious people. Accordingly, the
attraction of Mensa should vary inversely with the average IQ of the population
to which the potential members belong.
Second: Small, emergent nations such as
Rhodesia may be sensitive barometers of the brain drain from older and more
decadent ones. The IQ enrichment of the former is a harbinger of the IQ
impoverishment of the latter. Obviously, punitive taxation of the successful,
the imposition of economic hardship on young professionals, the underpayment of
the creative elites and the over-payment of the subnormal and the mediocre will
encourage some gifted people to emigrate and others to have small families
while stimulating the exuberant reproduction of the intellectually
under-endowed. Social planning of this sort has the dual advantage of
eliminating nonconformists, malcontents and trouble-makers, and of reducing
mean IQs to levels at which the population can readily be managed by its
socialist rulers. Given this state of affairs, the emergence of overseas white
elite communities, such as that of Rhodesia, should come as no surprise. What
is most interesting, and to this writer unexpected, is that the extrusion of
brain from socialist Britain seems to be far more effective at the so-called
genius level of 180+ than at the merely talented level of 130+.
--------------------
* I am indebted to Mr. H. Hall,
psychologist of the Rhodesian Ministry of Education, for this information on
Rhodesian IQs, and to Mr. Arthur Philip Smith, Minister of Education, for
making it available. I visited Rhodesia in November 1966.
Nathaniel Weyl: Nathaniel Weyl, a
writer and economist who was best known for the minor role he played in the
Alger Hiss spy case, died on April 13 at his home in Ojai, Calif. He was 94.
Mr. Weyl died of natural causes, said his stepdaughter Georgianne Cowan.
One of a type of midcentury American
intellectual who repudiated youthful communist affiliation and tilted toward
conservative thought, Mr. Weyl wrote several books, and two of them,
"Treason" (1950) and "Red Star Over Cuba (1960), aroused
critical interest and set off discussion in their times. But it was his
admission that he had been a communist in the 1930's, and a member of the
so-called Ware Group along with Hiss, that earned Mr. Weyl a measure of notoriety.
Mr. Weyl (pronounced "while") had been active in leftist student
groups while he was an undergraduate at Columbia College. He left academic life
for Washington in 1933 and joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,
where he was recruited into a communist cell that, he would later testify,
included Hiss..... According to Ms. Cowan, in later life Mr. Weyl moderated his
conservative views, and voted for Bill Clinton and John Kerry.
Nathaniel Weyl was born on July 20, 1910,
in New York City, the only child of Walter Edward Weyl, a founder of The New
Republic and a prominent progressive, and Bertha Poole Weyl. He received a
bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1931 and did some postgraduate work
at the London School of Economics and at Columbia University. He spent two
years overseas in the Army in World War II.
Bio from the N.Y. Times of May 8,
2005
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