"Smarter Scots more likely to die in combat"

[Nanook]

The Herald reports a study concluding from a sample of 491 persons that more intelligent Scots soldiers were more likely to die in combat in World War II. If you bother to read the article I'm sure you will agree that its reasoning is absurd. I would be embarrassed to bring it to your attention were it not that the published comments to this article invite the inference that The Herald's readers are a large step above its staff in intelligence.

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An IQ of 100.8 is hardly "smarter" but basically the statistical average. The value 97.4 too is really in the average. The 3% is within noise. One tends to try to qualify the results. Terman's classification puts 90-110 as "normal" or "average". One starts to talk about "more intelligent" as per IQ at around 120 or so with "gifted" starting around 130 or so. The system starts to really break down much above this level and looses their meaning save for those that might wear their IQ as a medal. Mensa International (High IQ club) sets their minimum entry requirement at an IQ of 131. Terman denoted genius (or near genius) to be those with IQ over 140.
IQ tests at one time were taken quite seriously (they have fallen a bit out of fashion over the years)--- when I was in school I was tested no less than once a year as their funding was linked to our "shiny numbers" --- and was often a basis for encouraging higher education and, when the numbers are "impressive enough", selection into privileged circles. The Oxbridge exams (more of less now scraped) were to a certain extent also an IQ test. The same held (or still holds) for the SAT and PSAT exams in the US. The average IQ at both Oxford and Cambridge as well as first tier (elite) schools were always well above 110 (despite the more than a few well connected twits at "Ivy Schools") and out of the context of class I'd suspect few if any with IQs of 100.8 could have ever made their way in.

There is a significant body of literature on war and soldier's roles with respect to class and education. One does not to join Mensa to grasp that those of average to lower IQs would have tended to be assigned to more risky jobs which would have been quicker to put than in harm's way than "smarter", more educated, men-- even high risk "elite units" such as the Seals.

Many of the cleverest never left the "home front" but were assigned to tactical intelligence (such as one of the MI sections) or used, during WW-II, as human calculators. Some of the most famous of these "machines" that worked in Los Alamos in the US (Manhattan Project) were Paul Erdös (used to love to tell some great stories about those days), Eugene Paul Wigner, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman and, of course, Willem Klein (who ended up after the war working in circuses as a "mental calculator" until he was recruited by CERN in late 1950s) .