Interesting article, but I feel it misses the simple fact that any individual with an IQ of 1000 is likely to be "insane" by any modern measure of the world - they certainly wouldn't have a world-view that has much in common with their "fellow men". As it stands, many of those who have exceptionally high IQs or high "intelligence" struggle to exist in a world that isn't geared for them. These "hyper-intelligent" individuals, should they ever exist, would likely be stoned by their fellow men, or would choose to be the other variety of stoned rather than suffer the stupid of the world.
I think this effect is significant even with IQs much lower than "super-intelligence". Socially, people organize into a hierarchy of authority. A significant rule of this structure is that should should never be smarter than your superiors - finding a better solution than your "betters" is akin to showing them to be wrong and is confused with a display of dominance. Persons of inferior social standing but superior intelligence are treated as a threat.
If there was a genetic component to "super-intelligence" then we would observe it. How many of those great minds listed had parents or children that also made the list: zero. Also, would any of these (suspiciously all European) super-geniuses have been as successful if there were born in a small backwater village? There are probably millions of people with Einstein-level intelligence around the world, but living in environments that are hardly conducive to the expression of their genius.
The breakthrough that we need to realize super-intelligence is not Eugenic or academic, it is social. The only way to allow the best minds in the world to blossom in potential is:
1. Grant access to intellectual resources and opportunities to everyone.
2. Stop the authoritarian practice of crushing dissent.
There absolutely are not millions of people with Einstein level intelligence around the world. That would imply that the probability of having Einstein level intelligence is on the order of one in a thousand, or as likely as having Down syndrome. This is manifestly not the case.
Supposedly 'Albert Einstein' had an IQ of around 160. My father's IQ was tested to be around 200. Yet you wouldn't know who the hell my father was even if I told you his name. It would place him as 1 in 4 billion according to these charts...
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx
However, Einstein would be 1 in 11,000. If the chart is to be believed, then people with an IQ of 160 or above would be about 655,000 (according to the current world population).
In any case, it doesn't matter so much anymore. My father is nearly broke, sick, and in poor health right now and lives with his parents. He was somewhat successful as a business man, but not overly so. He was well known within his community, and he certainly could do anything he wanted. He was a scuba diver, a pilot, an engineer, he speaks three languages, can play the piano and saxophone, he can program a computer and rebuild engines. Having super intelligent people will not make that much difference in the world, except in the cases where those people lead countries. Until we elect leaders who have such high intelligence, we won't see society change much at all. Intelligence does not equal money, and it doesn't equal power. It just means you can figure out things faster than others. With computers, an average person can solve complex mathematical problems faster than the highest IQ people could 100 years ago. IQ is far less relevant in today's world.
In any case, even if these high IQ people were elected, what happens when one of them has a stroke and all of a sudden their IQ is only half what it was (500)? Should we have a vote of no confidence and shun them from society? This just ends up as eugenics all over again. If you don't know what I am talking about, read about it here. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/science/haunted-files-the-...
From my experience, IQ results are very inflated. Your father was probably very bright, but an IQ of 200 is very very high, so high that it is unlikely that he was that smart. An IQ of 200 means he is one of the brightest in the world, and I've read here and there about people being tested on IQ of around 220. Statistically it's not possible.
I believe the word you mean is improbable. Nothing is impossible. And you may be using the later versions of the test. I'm not saying he was the smartest in the world, in fact, it may have been a flaw of the test. It was when the tests were being first developed. Regardless of what his intelligence was (it's far lower now thanks to a stroke he had a few years back) I'm just saying that it doesn't mean as much as it did.
> It was when the tests were being first developed.
So it was a ratio test, not a modern deviation test? (As makes sense since no accepted deviation test goes up to 200 in the first place...) A 200 would be nothing exceptional: it just meant he was substantially better than his year-bracket - a 4 year old acting like an 8 year old, a 5yo like 10yo, etc. Not that he was Einstein.
> If there was a genetic component to "super-intelligence" then we would observe it. How many of those great minds listed had parents or children that also made the list: zero.
High intelligence and other forms of talent certainly run in families. If you read bios of scientists and mathematicians (as I am doing now, actually, in reading the Albers compendiums of interviews with mathematicians, _Mathematical People_ and _Fascinating Mathematical People_), time and again you find that a great mathematician has mathematician relatives or family which were talented in other ways. Consider the Bachs, the Polgars, the Wieners, the Bernoullis, the Darwins... Remember one of the origins of research into intelligence: Galton researching English geniuses and noting they were often related. Such clustering is consistent both with environmental and genetic explanations, of course, but no one argues that there is no clustering at all!
> Also, would any of these (suspiciously all European) super-geniuses have been as successful if there were born in a small backwater village?
Many of them were. Murray in _Human Accomplishment_ notes that of his eminent figures, while they all tended to gravitate towards capital cities like London and Paris as young as possible and live and die there, they were often born in the countryside. (An extreme case of rural talent being discovered is Ramanujan.) This should be no surprise to you since urban populations have historically been a small fraction of total populations and so naturally a lot of great figures will hail from outside the cities.
> There are probably millions of people with Einstein-level intelligence around the world,
Maybe.
> but living in environments that are hardly conducive to the expression of their genius.
Yeah, no. Environments can't produce geniuses, but they can certainly prevent them. The mean IQs of places like India do not indicate many of their citizens are as far out on the tails as Einstein...
He was an ardent atheist who underwent a deathbed conversion. The person who administered the last sacraments to him - Father Anselm Strittmatter - said that he was so terrified of dying that he did his best to distract himself from that prospect. Even spending time reciting Goethe's Faust to his brother.
He was a brilliant man and he was understandably terrified of the very mortal fate that awaits all of us.
This is untrue. If it really were a universal, why would there be such high IQs in the first place? As well, it's not empirically obvious: some samples show dysgenics, others show eugenics. I'm sure you're familiar with Clark's claims about England and China, but you can also find eugenic samples in a number of modern samples (iirc, post-WWII Baby Boom was eugenic) collated in Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, 2012; and some HBDers crunching the GSS claim that current trends are eugenic for men but dysgenic for women.
Deeply questionable, since there's no real way to check that the populations remained the same by SES or ethnicity, and the apparatus themselves are not necessarily identical: a recent comment on the topic I read observes that the entire small decline could be explained by shifts in the luminance of the devices (the brighter the light, the faster you can react).
This is true - otherwise we'd have consistently growing intelligence over the generations - and instead we find the inverse - dysgenic fertility rules the day.
