If you spend much time exchanging e-mails with friends and colleagues, you have probably by now seen the table of statistics purporting to show average IQ by state, with each state's average income and 2000 presidential choice written in alongside.

* If you spend much time exchanging e-mails with friends and colleagues, you have probably by now seen the table of statistics purporting to show average IQ by state, with each state's average income and 2000 presidential choice written in alongside. At the top of the list are Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, with average IQs of 113, 111, and 111, average incomes in the mid twenty thousands, and 2000 presidential choices Gore, Gore, and Gore. Bottom of the list are Idaho, Utah, and Mississippi, with IQs down in the mid 80s, incomes around fifteen thousand, and 2000 choices Bush, Bush, and Bush. Neat, huh? You see, the Gore states are smarter than the Bush states, and more successful! Except that the whole thing is a hoax. The correlations are much too good for data of this type, and blogger Steve Sailer has tracked the spurious table back to a spoof cooked up in November 2002. The thing to note here is the eagerness with which lefties have rushed to embrace the hoax, with its supporting premise that IQ really does measure something significant--a notion which, in any other context, they would not touch with a ten-foot pole.