Yazata
Valued Senior Member
IQ scores are good measures of the ability to take IQ tests. I'm less convinced that IQ tests measure a single underlying cognitive variable that we can simply call 'intelligence'. Human cognition is composed of a whole variety of skills and capabilities that enable people to perform a wide variety of tasks. I'm not convinced that facility in these diverse tasks always rise and fall as a group, like the tide. Some people are good at some things and not nearly as good at others. Somebody may be extraordinary at imagining geometrical shapes, then folding them repeatedly in their mind's eye and predicting what the results would be. But the same person might be nearly hopeless at solving cross-word puzzles or writing poetry.
My impression is that if samples of atheists do outperform the general public on IQ tests, that the difference isn't very dramatic.
It would be interesting to break down the non-atheist part of the population by religious adherence, and separately get average IQ scores for adherents of different sorts of religiosity. My prediction is that members of some religious groups (Buddhists, Jews, Episcopalians) would likely outperform the atheists. My reason for making that prediction is that this is precisely what we do see regarding years of education completed. Atheists outperform believers as a whole by a fairly small margin, but some religious groups outperform atheists by an even larger margin. In other words, atheists as a group kind of end up in the high-average part of the amount-of-education range, definitely not sitting atop it.
I think that lots of things can move performance on tests up and down. Earlier posts have already mentioned that scores on IQ tests are correlated to race. They are also correlated to socio-economic status and to amount of education received. I do think that the tests are getting at underlying neurological variables in an extremely fragmentary fashion. But it's going to be awfully hard to identify and then to correct for all of the other non-neurological variables that are very likely skewing the scores.
I've met a number of people, typically above-average intelligent but rarely the kind of people who profoundly impress me, who were very proud of being Mensa members. My impression is that they were extraordinarily good puzzle-solvers, but not always intelligent people in the way that I think of intelligence. They just weren't very thoughtful or philosophical. Many of them didn't seem to be successful at much in life except getting into Mensa and maybe playing video-games. Many of them had a rather schizoid-style ability to focus obsessively on trivialities, while largely missing the big picture.
That gets me back to my earlier point about intelligence perhaps consisting of a wide variety of cognitive skills what might not be highly correlated to one another. In fact, some intellectual skills might even be inversely correlated to other skills. We see that happening in exaggerated fashion in the 'idiot-savant'. There are people out there who are almost super-human mathematical calculators, but who finish in the 'retarded' range for other skills.
And finally, there's another kind of intellectual skill that IQ tests don't even begin to measure, the managerial ability to focus and to put all of these diverse cognitive abilities to work in successfully identifying and then performing significant and important life tasks.
