Originally posted by farrago
ttac and gbemi24,
I think you are severly over-simplifying the concept of intelligence and underestimating the difficulty of assessing it. What exactly are we to conclude, if presented with one person's IQ score of 154, and another's score of 162? What qualitative differences are we to expect between the brains of these individuals? I don't think you know the answer to that question. In fact, I think it's completely unanswerable. Nebulous stuff.
Clearly, a high IQ does not necessarily mean that one will accomplish things that will change the world. In certain academic fields, however, I think it is a prerequisite for such accomplishments. For example, I am fairly sure that nobody that has won a nobel prize in physics in the last 30 years has had an IQ less than 150. I would be quite surprised if they did. I believe that IQ does measure something, and that is 'intellectual potential'.
Here's a listing of the factors that I think contribute to 1)MCAT 2)Med school performance 3) Life accomplishments
1) MCAT
A) Studying for the test. Clearly, if you take someone with a 170IQ, they will not get a 40 if they have not studied for the MCAT. However, if they have taken the prereqs within a few years, I would be surprised if they didn't get a 30 or so. My IQ is nowhere near 170, yet I got a 28 without studying for the MCAT. That is because the first time I took the prereqs, I understood the concepts well enough to remember it a few years later (or at least think through things enough to semi-derive equations)
B) IQ. I think the average med student (IQ 125) would be hard pressed to get a 35+ no matter how much they studied. I probably don't need to tell you this, but in my experience, premeds (and later, med students) are some of the most driven people on earth. Given that the MCAT is pretty much the most important single test in the life of a premed, I would think that they would do just about anything to get the maximum score possible. Yet the average med student MCAT hovers around 30. I think that this is evidence of a fairly strong correlation between MCAT and IQ. If I had to make a table of IQ vs MCAT, it would go something like this (flame away!)
MCAT 24 = IQ 112
MCAT 27 = IQ 120
MCAT 30 = IQ 125
MCAT 32 = IQ 130
MCAT 34 = IQ 140
MCAT 37 = IQ 150
MCAT 40 = IQ 155
MCAT 44 = IQ 162+
This is based on the following data points (admittedly my numbers below 27 are pure speculation):
a)My 41-43 MCAT/160 IQ HST friend
b)My 40-42 MCAT/155-160 IQ friend
c)Myself
d)My 34 MCAT/140 IQ neighbor
e)Average MCAT/IQ of med students
f) My roommate
2) Med school performance
A) Drive/desire. Someone with an IQ of 125 who studies 6-8 hours a day in addition to going to class is going to beat someone with an IQ of 150 who studies 2 hours a day and skips a bunch of classes. This is especially true in classes such as histo. However, in classes such as biostats, it's a different story. This type of class is great for someone with an IQ of 150, because there is practically no memorization, and everything rests on understanding the material. In order to back up this assertion, I will cite my experience with biostats (There is no way to cite this evidence without appearing to be bragging, so flame away, if you choose). I'm 80% done with biostats, and I've gone to 2 lectures out of ~35 so far. I have a 97% in the class, and I never study until the day before the exam (probably 5 hours or so). My friend who has a 27 MCAT goes to every class, studies her BUTT off, and yet is only barely passing. This class is the classic case where someone with a high-IQ would have a large advantage. Lots of thinking, little memorization. IQ is a huge factor in performance. However, most med school classes require alot of memorization, and that requires time. Which brings me to my next point
B) Memory. The better your memory, the better you'll do in med school ceteris paribus. Fortunately for the high-IQ folks, I think memory correlates positively with IQ. However, even though high-IQ folks might have a slight advantage, nothing beats sitting down in the library for hours and hours until you have memorized 30 pages of gross anatomy.
C) IQ. Given that time is a precious commodity in med school, the faster someone can learn and understand things, the better they will do. A high IQ correlates with a faster rate of learning material.
D) *Confounding factor*: The slacker coefficient. This isn't easily quantifiable, but it's essentially the opposite of Drive. If someone is smart, but sleeps in when he feels like it, goes out alot, or has tons of outside interests, he is essentially giving himself a handicap that he will have to make up for. Unfortunately for them, lots of smart people fall into this trap, mostly b/c they didn't really have to be all that disciplined, or work that hard as a pre-med.
3) Life accomplishments
A) Opportunity. There are probably some 170IQ people in India who just did not have access to resources needed to achieve their full potential. For example, take the Indian math genius Ramanujan:
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ramanujan.html
B) Drive (See 2A). Sometimes, however, externally applied motivation can be harmful. Take a look at this interesting link:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/printout/0,13675,501030217-421085,00.html
C) IQ. There are certain fields where a high IQ is a prerequisite to making advances. I think someone with an IQ of 100, or maybe 110 would find it impossible to get a PhD in Physics. No amount of access to resources or drive will compensate for an inability to synthesize new information and come up with the original ideas necessary to earn a PhD in Physics.
Clearly, IQ tests are measuring something. However, statistical acrobatics, in and of themselves, won't provide much useful information. Ratio IQ, childhood scores... kinda useless...
I disagree. IQ (while not perfect), is the best objective criterion we have for determining how 'smart' somebody is. I'd bet that if you had tested the average childhood IQ of PhD's in math and physics, or nobel prize winners, it would be apparent that their ratio IQ's as children would be much higher than 100. If this is true, then childhood IQ is useful. Once again, childhood IQ only shows _potential_. As you pointed out, it is possible to have a high IQ and not accomplish anything earth-shattering (Chris Langan). But there are confounding factors here. Alot of childhood geniuses either burn out, or are lacking in social interaction to the detriment of their overall development. They may be intellectually lazy, because they could get away with it in school. In Chris Langans case, he was beaten as a child. However, after spending the first part of his life in relative obscurity, he IS making discoveries and advancing his field.
Gbemi, it seems your interactions in the HIQ circuit are proving quite intoxicating. While I'm sure that you can objectively judge some of the accomplishments of some of the Mensans, Glians, and Triple Niners you've come in contact with, the basis of much of your praise rests on other, vague, personal assessments.
I would hardly call Nobel prizes, PhD's, or revolutionary discoveries in mathematics "vague and personal". These are objective measures of accomplishment, and almost without exception, were the results of the labors of individuals with a high-IQ. If there really was no correlation between high IQ and these discoveries, you would find that many nobel prize winners would have IQ's of 100, and half of them less than that. Essentially, an IQ histogram of nobel prize winners would be superimposable on that of the general population (mean=100, SD= 15). Of course the amplitude would be different.
To clarify: An IQ of 150 is about 1 in 1000. There have been 700 Nobel prizes awarded so far.
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/swedish/sympnobel/quiz.html
Ergo, you would expect that barely 1 Nobel prize winner would have an IQ of 150. This is a ridiculous assertion.
Anyway, I don't doubt that that the MCAT score correlates with one's intelligence (with the verbal section probably correlating most strongly).
Agreed, as long as English was your first language.
ttac
