Alison Motluk, Canada's Globe and Mail, September 15, 2007:
If you’re like me, you don’t like IQ tests. For one thing, you find it objectionable that someone thinks they can quantify your smarts that way, especially with the kinds of inane questions typically found on these exams. For another, the tests never seem to yield a score quite high enough, the way a cheap set of bathroom scales never produce a weight quite low enough, so you don’t want to put too much faith in it. And according to U.S. writer Stephen Murdoch’s intelligent new book on the subject, you’re right to be skeptical.
IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea explores how we’ve become obsessed with trying to measure innate intelligence, and all the many ways that quest has gone wrong. The history kicks off with Francis Galton, the famous British eugenicist. He put together a booth for the London International Health Exhibition of 1884, where he measured people’s physical attributes, things like height, hearing and the speed of your punch. He believed that physical superiorities were linked to mental ones (the latter revealed by a person’s place in society) and he wanted to prove it. No correlation was ever found, but the enthusiasm for measuring mental acuity caught on. – read article