A large number of websites and even quite a few books will tell you that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's IQ was 165. They'll also reveal that Benjamin Franklin's IQ was 160, Charles Dickens' was 180, Isaac Newton's was 190, and Blaise Pascal's was 195. There's
only one small problem with this data: The IQ test was invented in the early
20th Century -- long after all of these people were dead and buried. Here's
how this lunacy came about: The IQ test was first invented in France by Alfred
Binet in the late 19th Century as a way to measure academic skills and pick out
the students who were not learning as fast they could and should. It was not
designed to separate innately-smart people from less innately-smart people.
Binet, in fact, did not believe intelligence was innate. He saw intelligence
not as a thing, but as a process of acquiring certain thinking skills. (He
turned out to be quite correct.) Then
along came Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist in the early 20th century who
preferred Francis Galton's idea of intelligence: a certain innate quality that
each person is born with. Terman reinvented the IQ test and sold it to American
intellectuals and policymakers as a way to separate the intellectual wheat from
the idiotic chaff. Terman also began an epic study on geniuses entitled, Genetic
Studies of Genius. Mind
you, he had no proof that intelligence was gene-based. (We still don't have any
such proof, contrary to what you might read elsewhere. See my post on heritability.) Terman
was well-funded and well-staffed. In 1926, he assigned one of his protégés,
Catharine Cox, to somehow adapt their new IQ test to estimate the IQs of 301
well-known historical figures. Here's
the rub: Even in Terman's context, this made no sense. It was pure intellectual
foolishness, even if you completely accepted his argument that IQ detected
innate intelligence. That's not just because none of these people actually took
an IQ test, but also because IQ tests only measure people's academic skills
against other people their same age. The actual score is not an actual score of
right vs. wrong answers, but a weighted score to compare every test-taker's
performance with every other same-age test-taker's performance in that
particular year. 100 is always the median. A score of 100 means that 50% of the
same-age students scored higher than you, and 50% scored lower. So
how could anyone possibly hope to go back in time, look at the work of dead
people, and deduce their IQ score? It was impossible. In
her report[i], Cox
acknowledged: "The correction attempted in the
present report is a crude approximation . . ." Cox
and Terman assigned a score of 200 to their hero Francis Galton. That would
make him one of the great geniuses of all time. Thanks partly to this study, IQ has become one of the great myths of our time. It's going to take us another century to replace it with a more sensible understanding of intelligence. __________________
[i]
"The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses," by Catharine M.
Cox, from Genetic Studies of Geniu, edited by Lewis M. Terman. Stanford University Press,
1926.
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