Following the publication of this article, Laurent Minguet sent La Libre, this Wednesday, December 28, via his lawyer Marc Uyttendaele, a right of reply. Here is the right of reply:
“The IQ test is a series of four sets of exercises carried out by a specialist psychologist. An IQ test takes an average of 2 hours. The overall result follows a normal (Gaussian) curve with an average of 100 in Europe and a standard deviation of 15. There is therefore only 2.5% of the population with an IQ greater than 130, a condition for being part of the club Mensa. IQ develops until the age of 16-17 and then remains stable throughout life with a slight decrease, like height.
Contrary to popular belief, IQ is different from intelligence. The IQ notably measures the speed (performance) of certain basic intellectual skills such as logical sequences or puzzles.
However, the speed of execution is not always decisive. For example, a chess player who thinks for 2 hours but wins the game is better than one who plays faster and loses. Entrance exams that assess performance too much risk eliminating good candidates by retaining only the fastest but perhaps less creative or less gifted. For example, to select a future starred chef at the hotel school, we should not retain only the fastest candidates to cut onions. It is however a little what we see in the program “Top Chef”.
IQ is a useful measure in psychology, but there are long-term unemployed people with IQs above 130 and university researchers with IQs below 100.
Therefore, the observation, constant for decades, that the average IQ varies according to ethnic groups is not racist. Racism depends on the intent to discriminate or hate, absent from the controversial tweet.
The finding of IQ differences is widely discussed in the USA. If the environmental causes (access to health care, good food, quality of sleep, etc.) are unanimous, there is controversy between psychologists and geneticists on the genetic causes as illustrated, for example this article. It is therefore necessary to continue studies to advance knowledge and not to prohibit them by egalitarian ideologue.
It was in 2017 that I became interested in this subject. I recruited a specialized neuropsychologist to carry out tests on a voluntary basis on different subjects who accepted it because many doubted doubted because they attributed an exaggerated importance to this measure according to popular belief. These tests confirmed certain statistics such as the average IQ of civil engineers (130) but also paradoxical cases which led me, in 2021, to qualify the simplistic idea which associates IQ with “logical” intelligence even if, from the start, I knew that IQ does not measure emotional intelligence or essential creativity.
A tweet from 2019, taken out of the context of these thoughts and other tweets on the subject, can be (mis)interpreted by those unaware of the realities of IQ. Some may have taken offense and I am, of course, sorry for them. On the other hand, I am disappointed that too many people today, including colleagues from the Royal Academy of Belgium, seem to have judged in emotion or malevolence a subject that does not concern them. My commitment to secularism is perhaps no stranger to this witch hunt.
As for the complaint lodged by UNIA, with which the Academy is associated, whose administrative commission has decided to prosecute, following 250 years of existence, academicians with heterodox or controversial remarks, the wisest attitude would be to wait for the judicial treatment before qualifying, wrongly I think, its supposedly racist character. If the judicial truth was on my side, all those who would have prematurely condemned the racist nature of it would simply have slandered and will, perhaps in turn, have to explain themselves to the courts.
