I wanted to add something to this thread, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go... seems like it took the same path as the other one by this banned poster
edit:
okay, I guess I will add something. I wanted to comment on the IQ test thing. IQ tests do test a certain level of intelligence. You are partially correct in that they don't necessarily test everyone in the best possible way for that person. However, the earliest mass use of an IQ test was by the US military during WWI.
Robert Yerkes, the president of the American Psychological Association at the time, convinced the army to scan all recruits. As he put it, "We should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives, but rather for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed in the military service"
Along the idea you proposed though, I wanted to point out that yes, the first test, called the Army Alpha test was designed for the a purpose "...the critical points were abilities to understand language to perform reasoning with semantic and quantitative relationships, to make 'practical judgments,' to infer rules and regularities from data, and to recall general information". They later had to make a Army Beta test because many of the test takers were illiterate. Also, if you read through the story, the results later were highly controversial because they found that it tended to show certain ethnic, racial, or regional groups scoring higher than others. Mostly, I would think this would have to do with education levels around the country at the time, immigrants that were just learning this land and the language, etc.. Because of these factors, you could see that the test was skewed toward a certain populace and obviously wasn't necessarily the best possible measure of "intelligence" even if it did manage in some cases to differentiate a person with better critical thinking skills from another person who without them.
However, from the use of these tests on 1.75 milllion people over the course of the war, they learned much about intelligence testing and it's uses, and it started a wave of similar tests being developed around the world.
A great link on the history of the IQ test:
http://www.aceviper.net/aceviper_net...e_iq_test.html
....
Of course today we realize and are starting to explore the idea of multiple intelligences and that the whole idea of "genius" in our classical sense is not necessarily a true measure of intellect. Is an amazing artist like Picasso, Dali, or Monet necessarily a great mathematician and spatial reasoner? Maybe they were, who knows, but the point is that you can't measure all areas of intelligence the same way. What about Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach? If you could take an IQ test from today back and let them take it, would they do well on it? Most likely they wouldn't, but nobody would deny they were all geniuses.