“Say you have a kid with an IQ of 125, and a kid with an IQ of 85,” someone tweeted at me last week.
“You think they should be in the same classroom, learning the same things at the same pace? Not fair to either one.”
You might be surprised to learn I hadn’t mentioned IQ at any point. I’d made a lighthearted joke about my school experiences, namely my teachers in Derry wholly rejecting the idea of “gifted” or “non-gifted” students.
Nevertheless, I replied that I personally found IQ a wholly unconvincing measure of a child’s potential, as a mutable, arbitrary metric affected by education, nutrition, rest, exercise, and a million other things, and the idea that it’s a set integer, ordained at birth, which would slow down others nearby is just “astrology for racists”.
“Yes,” another replied sarcastically. “It’s racist to want airline pilots and heart surgeons to be high-IQ individuals.”
Again, a stretch of the discussion into unmentioned territory and, again, from another user whose timeline was otherwise filled with galloping racism.
So why do people of the above political persuasion have such an obsession with IQ? In 2024, it’s not something most people think about at all.
It’s likely you’ve never taken an IQ test in your adult life, excepting perhaps an online one you did out of idle curiosity.
You’ve almost certainly never had to take one to qualify for a degree, qualification, scholarship, or job.
While the term IQ itself has long passed into general vocabulary as a synonym for “how smart someone is”, few people consider any such number central to their conception of their own intelligence, or that of others.
The origins of IQ as a metric are relatively benign. A questionnaire, created up by French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1905, tested the verbal skills of children, in the benevolent hope that a single standardised test could identify those who might need extra support from educational institutions.
This was strictly posed as a diagnostic measure, to highlight those who’d benefit from greater instruction, and emphatically NOT as a way of classifying those for whom education was less useful, or should be discontinued.
Neither was the resulting score judged to be a rating of something as wildly definitive as “general intelligence”.
Unfortunately, many scientists who would go on to adapt Binet’s test believed intelligence to be hereditary, unchangeable, and greatly affected by race, and therefore sought a number by which an intellectual underclass could be determined.
In some cases, this was specifically with the aim of removing these mental defectives from society entirely, whether by forced sterilisation, or outright murder.
I should be very, very clear that few proponents of IQ today are seeking the sterilisation or murder of those they class as unintelligent, and are merely invested in the idea that a single number can determine someone’s intelligence, and crucially, that this number is both hereditary and immutable.
There is little to support such a hypothesis. For one thing, the idea that a single number could describe something as complex as human intelligence is fatuous on its face.
An IQ test — in ways that are often quite ingenious and replicable — tests a person’s aptitude for things like language, visual logic, object symmetry and so on.
This does undoubtedly tell us something about the brain’s abilities and can have worthwhile uses in a range of applications, but it is likely better expressed as “they are good or bad at these types of puzzles, which may indicate other skills they have”.
You may find the results fascinating, even useful, but it falls so far short of even a casual definition of “intelligence” that to claim otherwise is laughable, before we begin discussing the many strands of intelligence which are entirely absent; like emotional intelligence, practical intelligence, creativity, spatial awareness or mathematics.
When one then considers whether this number is hereditary or immutable however, these issues really compound.
It is currently proposed that the heredity of IQ is around 75% by the time someone is an adult, which IQ boosters posit as evidence that some people — or races, or genders — are just born smarter and thus their kids are too.
If African-Americans score lower than white Americans on average, or women lower than men, they insist that this infers a supremacy of intellect within the latter in each case.
This ignores the innumerable other social, cultural or political reasons why one person — or race or gender — might do worse on an extremely specific and limited test than another; or that these very same conditions will continue to bear on their children within the sprawling, imperfect world in which we live.
Even if IQ described something 100% equivalent to general intelligence, and even it was 100% hereditary, none of this would suggest it was unchangeable, as evidenced by the fact that IQ scores have improved across the world over the past century.
Numerous explanations have been suggested, with better schooling, nutrition, and avoidance of infectious diseases all being touted — even the reduction of lead in paint — making its status as an immutable marker of, well, anything difficult to entertain.
There are several entirely useful applications for IQ tests: In educational development, cognitive research or just the enjoyment people glean from testing their brains.
But fetishising their results only really provides comfort to the type of person who wishes to make themselves feel superior by genetic fiat.
Clinging to the myth of a single number that describes how smart you are is only really attractive to people who lack the intelligence to engage with something as complex and multi-faceted as the human mind.
You might say IQ is a great indicator of intelligence, in that the second you see someone obsessing over it, you can usually conclude they’re dumb as rocks.
