All corrections
Substack March 28, 2026 at 03:53 AM

lessonsunveiled.substack.com/p/contra-scott-on-lynns-national-iq

1 correction found

1
Claim
Lynn doesn’t explain how he calculated an IQ score of 75 from it.
Correction

This appears to conflate two different Zambia entries in Lynn’s work. In Lynn’s 1991 table, the Zambia IQ of 75 is attached to a sample of 1,011 adults, not a 152-person sample.

Full reasoning

The post appears to mix up two separate Zambia entries in Lynn's compilations.

The Lynn table relevant to the Bell Curve discussion is the 1991 paper the post itself screenshots. In that table, Zambia is listed as adults, n = 1,011, Progressive Matrices, with an intelligence value of 75, sourced to Pons, 1974; Crawford Nutt, 1976.

A later Lynn compilation from 2006 lists a different Zambia entry: adults, n = 152, SPM, IQ 64, Pons 1974.

So the claim that Lynn derived an IQ of 75 from a 152-person Zambian copper-miner study is not accurate for the 1991/Bell Curve estimate under discussion. The 75 value in the 1991 table is tied to the 1,011-person Zambia entry, not the later 152-person entry.

2 sources
Model: OPENAI_GPT_5 Prompt: v1.16.0