IQ: Dumb-dumb-dumb

When we think about geniuses (genii? Or is that many genies?), we obviously think about Einstein and his ilk. You’d probably include Pythagoras on your list, although lord knows his much-ballyhooed theorem hasn’t done me much good in life; and Darwin, despite his anxieties about raising a mad and inbred family; and maybe Shakespeare, if you ignore The (so-called) Comedy of Errors and that best-forgotten one about nymphs and shepherdesses prancing around in the forest. You probably would not include Sir Paul McCartney on your list, despite perhaps enjoying a rousing rendition of ‘The Frog Chorus’ when you’re a bit pissed, and yet 16.3% of respondents to this week’s Guardian poll – Who Is The Greatest Living Genius? – did just that. According to the poll, Macca is deemed to be seven times more of a genius than the woman who identified HIV as the cause of AIDS, and only a little bit less of a genius than the man who invented the world wide web. (Massively in the lead with 40.7% was, of course, Stephen Hawking.)

So this week, I have been thinking about intelligence, genius and IQ.

‘IQ’ stands for the German phrase Intelligenz-Quotient (er, Intelligence Quotient), a term coined in 1912 by psychologist William Stern. There are two main ways of calculating IQ: the old-fashioned ratio IQ, which divides your mental age by your actual age and multiplies by 100, and the more modern deviation IQ, which measures you against an average IQ of 100, generally generating a lower figure than your ratio IQ. According to some tests, a score over 115 makes you ‘bright’, over 130 ‘moderately gifted’, over 145 ‘highly gifted’, and over 160 ‘exceptionally gifted’. A score of over 175 puts you among the ‘profoundly gifted’, an elite group containing less than 1% of the human population and chaired, one imagines, by Sir Paul McCartney.

The highest (ratio) IQ ever recorded was a whopping 228, which earned the aptly-surnamed Marilyn vos Savant a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Her enormous brain got a bit carried away with itself, however, and vos Savant went on to write a widely ridiculed book discrediting the findings of Andrew Wiles – who had just solved the notorious 350-year-old maths problem Fermat’s Last Theorem – showing that a high IQ isn’t necessarily accompanied by a great deal of common sense.

A lot of no-doubt-highly-IQ’d people have done a lot of research into IQ, and come to the totally underwhelming conclusion that a high IQ makes you more likely to live long and prosper, while a low IQ puts you at greater risk of accidentally injuring yourself whilst engaging in reckless criminal activity. Things that can affect your IQ include your parents’ IQ, the structure of your brain’s cortex, your childhood musical training, and whether or not you were breastfed (breast is indeed best).

So that’s IQs sorted out, but what about genius? While some scientists have come up with formulae to calculate genius (‘Measure a person’s general ability, then measure their cleverness, then square both numbers and add them together, then take the square root’ – JCM Garnett), others have spent lifetimes philosophising about what makes a genius. Personally I think anyone who has officially been labelled a polymath (a bit of an all-rounder) deserves to be called a genius – the likes of Goethe, who discovered a bone in the human jaw and wrote the marvellous Faust, or Benjamin Franklin, who drafted the Declaration of Independence and invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses.

Yet more scientists – ones with far too much time on their hands – have trawled the annals of history to try to work out the IQs of people who had the audacity to be brainy before IQs were invented. Somehow they came to the conclusion that Goethe had an IQ of 179, putting him below Wittgenstein (190), but above Descartes (162), Mozart (153) and that thicko Charles Darwin (152).

But are all these numbers and tests ultimately meaningless? At my secondary school, we were compelled by the careers woman to do a test called the Morrisby Profile. We spent hours locked in the sports hall doing a variety of verbal, numerical and spatial tests to help us determine what sort of glittering careers awaited us in later life. One of the tests involved writing as many ‘S’s as you could in the space of a minute. The sports hall was freezing, it being November and the heating being off as usual, and I only managed about 30 before my hand turned into an icy claw. The test results criticised my poor dexterity and suggested I become a soil engineer.