Intelligence Quotient

I was reading "A Song for Selma" by Kurt Vonnegut the other day where a group of school teachers discover that a certain pupil is a genius and so encourage him to do better, while another dumb pudgy boy is criticized for his stupidity. In my previous blog posts, I've discussed how nature and nurture shapes us into the individuals that we are today and will become in the future. So this brings us to the question of what is intelligence? 

Granted that we have all heard of the IQ test and how it determines how smart a person is but we have to keep in mind that the test itself was created by a group of human beings who are prone to bias and would think in a certain way. There is the very clear distinction between Arts and Science but a person skilled in the Science discipline maybe bad at art and vice versa. So if you were to judge him from an Arts perspective he wouldn't be brilliant whereas from a Science perspective he could be a genius. We only know the I.Q of the most brilliant minds in the field of Science, Stephen Hawking for example. But does that go to say that someone like Michael Angelo was not very intelligent? Today paintings that look like they could have been done by a 3 year old seem to sell for millions of dollars because the buyer sees it as a genius' work. 


Survey's have shown that teachers expect a child who is physically more attractive to perform better and will be biased towards that child and push him/her to perform better. So if nurture does play a bigger part than nature, then that means that subconsciously we are hindering the performance of a child just because "he does not seem to be the type that does well" etc. So not having a clear distinction then leads to the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Proposed by Howard Gardner, it consists of 8 abilities that a certain individual could be categorized into. Again, humans and our need to categorize...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

So really there is no way to tell if an individual is actually intelligent or how intelligent he is. Everybody is in their own way some form of intelligent, the idea is to find and nurture that ability. Find something you like and are good at and stick with it.

The famous Albert Einstein quote comes to mind; "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid".