This study tests the hypothesis presented by Penke, Denissen, and Miller (2007a) that condition-dependent traits, including intelligence, attractiveness, and health, are universally and uniformly preferred as characteristics in a mate relative to traits that are less indicative of condition, including personality traits. We analyzed…

Recent results of international assessment programs (e.g., PISA) have shown a large difference in high school students' performance between northern and southern Italy. On this basis, it has been argued that the discrepancy reflects differences in average intelligence of the inhabitants of regions and is associated with genetic factors ( and ).…

Studies investigating evolutionary theories on the origins of national differences in intelligence have been criticized on the basis that both national cognitive ability measures and supposedly evolutionarily informative proxies (such as latitude and climate) are confounded with general developmental status. In this study 14 Y chromosomal…

People with higher general cognitive ability in early life have more favourable levels of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in adulthood and CVD itself. The mechanism of these associations is not known. Here we examine whether general cognitive ability and CVD risk factors share genetic and/or environmental aetiology. In this large,…

Criticisms advanced by Felice and Giugliano (2011) of the thesis that IQs in Italy are higher in the north than in the south are answered and new data confirming the thesis are given from the PISA 2009 study and for math and reading abilities in the recent INVALSI study. New genetic data are given showing higher frequency of blond hair the…

The present study was intended to provide perspective, albeit less than unequivocal, on the research of Lynn (2010) who reported higher IQs in the northern than southern Italian regions. He attributes this to northern Italians having a greater genetic similarity to middle Europeans and southern Italians to Mediterranean people. Higher regional IQ…

Many explanations have been proposed for the evolution of our anomalously large brains, including social, ecological, and epiphenomenal hypotheses. Recently, an additional hypothesis has emerged, suggesting that advanced cognition and, by inference, increases in brain size, have been driven over evolutionary time by the need to deal with…

Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) have convincingly established that national IQs correlate positively with GDP, education, and many other social and economic factors. The direction of causality remains debatable. The present study re-examines data from military psychological assessments of the German federal army that show strong IQ gains of 0.5 IQ point…

Self-perceived abilities (SPA), which play an important role in academic achievement, have been recently reported to be fully attributable to genetic and non-shared environmental influences. To replicate and extend this finding, 732 Croatian twins (15-22 years old) were assessed on cognitive ability, self-assessed intelligence (SAI), and Five…

Research has consistently revealed that average IQ scores vary significantly across macro-level units, such as states and nations. The reason for this variation in IQ, however, has remained at the center of much controversy. One of the more provocative explanations is that IQ across macro-level units is the result of genetic differences, but…

In his article "In Italy, North-South differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy," Richard Lynn claims to have found the reason causing the divergence between the Northern and the Southern regions of Italy. This article identifies the four main hypotheses formulated in his paper…

Regional differences in IQ are presented for 12 regions of Italy showing that IQs are highest in the north and lowest in the south. Regional IQs obtained in 2006 are highly correlated with average incomes at r = 0.937, and with stature, infant mortality, literacy and education. The lower IQ in southern Italy may be attributable to genetic…

The ranking of Wechsler subtests in terms of their "g" loadings is equivalent to ranking them in terms of the cognitive complexity of the tasks measured. Lower performing groups do not always fall behind higher performing groups the more complex the task. But that is the general rule, no matter whether the cause of the lower performance…

Although a negative relationship between fertility and education has been described consistently in most countries of the world, less is known about the relationship between intelligence and reproductive outcomes. Also the paths through which intelligence influences reproductive outcomes are uncertain. The present study uses the NLSY79 to analyze…

In 50 U.S. states, we found a positive manifold across 11 measures including IQ, skin color, birth rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, HIV/AIDS, violent crime, and state income with the first principal component accounting for 33% of the variance (median factor loading = 0.34). The correlation with a composite of total violent crime was…