To answer that question, you first have to specify how the number that serves as the measure of intelligence is obtained. Unlike with height, there is no obvious simple way to come up with a number, and elaborate methods can always be engineered so as to change the resulting distribution.
In fact, at the time when I delved into the IQ research literature to try and make some sense out of these controversies, one of my major frustrations was that nobody, to my knowledge, asks the following question. Once a test has been normed to produce a normal distribution for a given population, what exact patterns of deviation from normal distribution do we see when we try to apply it to different populations (or to various non-representative subpopulations)? It seems to me that a whole lot of insight about the Flynn effect and other mysterious phenomena could be gained this way, and yet as far as I know, nobody has done it.
To answer that question, you first have to specify how the number that serves as the measure of intelligence is obtained. Unlike with height, there is no obvious simple way to come up with a number, and elaborate methods can always be engineered so as to change the resulting distribution.
In fact, at the time when I delved into the IQ research literature to try and make some sense out of these controversies, one of my major frustrations was that nobody, to my knowledge, asks the following question. Once a test has been normed to produce a normal distribution for a given population, what exact patterns of deviation from normal distribution do we see when we try to apply it to different populations (or to various non-representative subpopulations)? It seems to me that a whole lot of insight about the Flynn effect and other mysterious phenomena could be gained this way, and yet as far as I know, nobody has done it.