Get the latest tech news

Studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science

Stratospheric IQs are like leprechauns, unicorns, or mermaids

Now that I’ve finished being hard on poor Anne Roe, long deceased and unable to defend herself, an interesting woman who lived and worked when science was more of a Wild West, and who was the 9th tenured female professor at Harvard, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the other stuff in her book is fascinating, like her examination of Nobel Prize winners’ habits and backgrounds. Stratospheric IQs are about as real as leprechauns, unicorns, mermaids—they’re fun to tell tales about, but the evidence for them being a repeatedly measurable phenomenon that matters in any meaningful sense of the word is zip, zero, zilch. In fact, on re-reading it after originally planning to cite it for this essay, I was struck by Gould’s weak and judgy arguments in his The Mismeasure of Man, a book that supposedly takes down research on IQ.

Get the Android app