Lynn and Nyborg respond, and Steve Pinker weighs in
http://www.amren.com/features/2012/08/richard-lynn-and-helmuth-nyborg-reply-to-ron-unz/
Lynn and Nyborg respond, and Steve Pinker weighs in
http://www.amren.com/features/2012/08/richard-lynn-and-helmuth-nyborg-reply-to-ron-unz/
Intelligence is the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. IQ tests measure cleverness, not intelligence. This is not to downplay the importance of cleverness. The fact that the wealth of nations is correlated with IQ is proof that cleverness is a desirable trait, but it has nothing to do with intelligence.
On IQ tests:
IQ tests measure the *breadth* of "cleverness", but not the depth of it. Most people who are geniuses at some special field would get ceiling scores in certain sub-tests. I.e., their overall IQ score is artificially lowered (but then the overall score is not that important, in their case). I believe Feynman was one such (ceiling scores on some sub-tests, but mediocre in others).
The other point is that IQ tests are insufficiently broad -- they don't measure certain cerebellar capacities, like extreme manipulative facility posessed by Euler or Jacobi (or, if the "objects" maniuplated are not infinite series but some other kind of diagram, then virtually all mathematicians and experimental scientists -- e.g., Newton, Thomas Young). That is something not reducible to any of the sub-tests in an IQ test. They also don't measure your "inner eye" or ability to visualize a complicated diagram -- this ability was possessed by Gauss, von Neumann, Kelvin, and E. Cartan. I have neither of these abilities to any high degree, but my "IQ" is much higher than Feynman's.
"IQ" tests can't measure the ability to deal with scale -- or, the kind of common sense needed to navigate through very large problems (not the small ones in tests). IQ tests don't measure the capacity to write very melodious prose, which is a matter of how one's memory works (that is, when writing prose you remember & recall not the resemblance betwen phrases, but the resemblance between the *muscular exertion* that one expends in order to formulate certain phrases). IQ doesn't measure the capacity for building new heuristic languages. They don't measure the capacity to select, from various possibilities, the right (rather than wrong) resemblance -- which is the capacity for poetry, and instrumental music, and also modern math (in the style of Poincare, or Hermann Weyl). These all take time, a period of gestation.
The kind of mental abilities most relevant for advances in whatever technical field (and art is just as or more "technical" than the sciences), involve -- in a word, *depth* rather than breadth.
BUT, BUT, BUT. The basis of "creativity" (if by this you just mean originality) has in turn little to do with mental *capacities*. Rather, the most original discoveries are based on *incapacities* (combined with capacities), since those are peculiar to a particular person. That is, it is the ability to make a *mistake* (that only you would make), but to make something out of this mistake. The mistake strikes out at an unexpected direction. This is definitely the basis of some of Hilbert's achievements -- he would try to distort the problem into something simpler, but then then this other problem would unexpectedly turn out to be relevant.
BTW, what I said above has the seemingly obvious objection that I haven't clarified the distinction between a "capacity" and "incapacity" -- for surely if the ability to make "mistakes" in a specific way leads to originality, then surely that would be a "capacity" of some sort?
This distinction seems to be: that one cannot imagine any kind of improvement on originality based on someone's mental peculiarities, without actually sacrificing the nature of that originality. That is, everything is a trade-off. This is similar to how it is impossible to "improve" on an artistic artifact like a painting without also losing something. It is quite easy to imagine improving the intellect of someone like Gauss, or E. Cartan, or even Euler (by imagining an augmented retentive memory, or else by some way in which an improved tactile-motor sense can develop by Lamarckian evolution) -- but not quite possible to imagine this for the particular abilities of Hermite, or Hilbert, or any artist (e.g., Rembrandt, Dante, Goethe, Beethoven). The highest originality is ultimately individuality.
"(that is, when writing prose you remember & recall not the resemblance between phrases, but the resemblance between the *muscular exertion* that one expends in order to formulate certain phrases)"
Interesting idea. Is this your own hypothesis or would you be able to recommend any reading on it? I'd never considered the laws underlying the quality of prose before.