JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I found an interesting bit a the end of an article that I happened to see--a wonderful last line, and the second good line I've seen in this young day. (The other one comes from my friend Jeff Donlan out in Santa Fe, who started the sentence of an email yesterday with "The ice sublimed...", but that is another story.) The sentence that I had in mind is "Youth too often fails to interpret itself to age", which is the half-inscrutable closer to the anonymous book review "The Numerical Measurement of Genius" of Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius which appears in Nature magazine for 14 May 1927. The reviewer is referencing the translation of childhood IQs of their later-to-be-famous selves. The reviewer points out that Ben Franklin's intelligence quotient was estimated at 145 IQ at a young age, while Darwin as a child was 135, and (somehow) Newton was given 130 and John Locke a 125.
Where this was going, I don't truly know (though the reviewer ultimately found high potential in Terman's work here in 1927, and Terman lists as top-100 or so of all-time cited work in psychology). I do know that this one one installment of Terman's work on genius and is one of the longest-conducted longitudinal studies in the history of psychology. One conclusion that Terman reached after many years up to his elbows in geniousity was that high-IQ doesn't necessarily make a "success", that there isn't a correlation between intellect and achievement. So I guess the mostly "normal" IQs for the geniuses named earlier also didn't correlate to their later super-achievements, or something.
I just liked the sentence for its oddness, disappointing as it is, because it is almost artful in its vaguely condescending nature.
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