Intelligence Shows Its Ugly Face

If you had a glass of water and wanted to know how much water was in that glass, you would most likely transfer it into some kind of measuring device, like a graduated cylinder or something that measured volume. What if they had not invented anything like a graduated cylinder yet and you still wanted to know how much water was in that glass? So you decided to just take three glasses of water that had noticeably different amounts in them. Then the one with the least amount of water you call “not enough”, the one with a lot of water you called “too much” and the one in the middle you called “just right”. You told everyone about your discovery and they said, “that’s easy enough for me let’s use it”. You went on your merry way, thinking you were right, or were you?
Stephen Jay Gould presents and argues with the claim “that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unaltera...