Knowledge and genius | AC Grayling

source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/01/genius-knowledge-iq-tests

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May 01, 2009 22:30:00 GMT Share

Intelligence is about creativity and wit, not scoring well in tests – as Einstein, a poor student but a brilliant thinker, shows

It is a common presumption that if people know a lot, they must be intelligent. Anyone who can reel off capital cities or count to 10 in several languages – or, in the case of a two-year-old girl heralded in newspapers this week, tell an ­apple from a banana early enough – is counted a bright spark.

And often enough intelligence, a good memory and a well-informed mind go together because intelligence prompts curiosity, curiosity results in knowledge, and memory keeps the knowledge available.

But there is no automatic connection between knowledge and intelligence. There are plenty of very bright people who do not know the world's capitals and cannot count in other languages, because they have never had a chance to learn them. In rural Africa there must be millions of smart kids who know nothing but local lore; they are Thomas Grey's "village Hampdens" and "mute inglorious Miltons".

By the same token plenty of people know lots of facts without being creative, thoughtful, quick-witted, humorous and perceptive – the marks of true intelligence. Sometimes an overload of facts is the mark of a dull and pedestrian mind, the antithesis of intelligence.

Moreover, there are different kinds of intelligence, better described as different gifts of mind, so that a person can be wonderfully talented in one respect and hopeless in another. It is misleading to describe anyone as intelligent without specifying what form the intelligence takes. Some mental aptitudes are hard-wired: gifts for maths and music (which often go together) require no knowledge, and manifest themselves early in life. So does artistic ability. Many autists have extremely high-order talents in these respects without acquiring any knowledge, or even interacting much with other people.

But other aptitudes require training, data, experience and practice. Here intelligence and a body of knowledge meet, and the former acts on the latter in productive ways. One can train a parrot to reel off English kings and queens, but it takes an accomplished historian to tell us insightful things about them.

"Intelligence tests" have always been a matter of controversy. Practice improves scores, which raises a ­question mark over whether they capture ­anything objective. If someone scores high on verbal tests and low on spatial ones, what does that overall score tell us about the individual in question? ­Nothing very informative.

There are many "high IQ" societies, the best-known being Mensa, which admits people with IQs in the top 2% of the population.

At Mensa's 50th anniversary in 1996 one of the founders, Lancelot Ware, said he regretted the fact that members devoted far more time to puzzles than improving the world.

That prompts a thought: intelligence is a matter of output, not scores in a test. Einstein was unsuccessful at school and no great shakes as a mathematician, but he was creative and insightful, and saw a whole new way of thinking about gravity and the structure of space-time. A vivid interest in things, and an active desire to understand more about them, is a major characteristic of intelligence. When this leads to great creativity and important discoveries, we call it genius.

In the ancient world a genius was a creature who whispered ideas, ambitions and insights into your ear. The Romantics internalised genius, identifying it with their own inner selves – what Proust called le moi profond, the deepest me. As there are many kinds of achievement, so there are many kinds of genius suited to them. To all, the wonderful old cliche about 99% perspiration applies.

IQ tests rarely predict achievement or correlate with knowledge, and they are too blunt an instrument to capture the variety of human gifts. The latter are what matter. As with everything else, we know these gifts by their fruits, not by artificial ways of defining them.

Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God'

by Telegraph

Thanks to Linda Ward Selbie for the link.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2111174/Intelligent-people-'less-likely-to-believe-in-God'.html

Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God'
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor

People with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God, according to a new study.

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said

many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.

But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.

Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.

A survey of Royal Society fellows found that only 3.3 per cent believed in God - at a time when 68.5 per cent of the general UK population described themselves as believers.

A separate poll in the 90s found only seven per cent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God.

Professor Lynn said most primary school children believed in God, but as they entered adolescence - and their intelligence increased - many started to have doubts.

He told Times Higher Education magazine:

"Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God."

He said religious belief had declined across 137 developed nations in the 20th century at the same time as people became more intelligent.

But Professor Gordon Lynch, director of the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck College, London, said it failed to take account of a complex range of social, economic and historical factors.

"Linking religious belief and intelligence in this way could reflect a dangerous trend, developing a simplistic characterisation of religion as primitive, which - while we are trying to deal with very complex issues of religious and cultural pluralism - is perhaps not the most helpful response," he said.

Dr Alistair McFadyen, senior lecturer in Christian theology at Leeds University, said the conclusion had "a slight tinge of Western cultural imperialism as well as an anti-religious sentiment".

Dr David Hardman, principal lecturer in learning development at London Metropolitan University, said: "It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief. Nonetheless, there is evidence from other domains that higher levels of intelligence are associated with a greater ability - or perhaps willingness - to question and overturn strongly felt institutions."

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