My World View: On having a high IQ
After I took the British Mensa invigilated IQ test in 1976, I was told that my score was 159. I gather that, on the scale used by Mensa, this corresponds to the percentile at 99.9, putting me in the top 0.1% of the population; but that may be inaccurate. In any case, as far as is known, much of the cause of an individual’s IQ is prenatal/perinatal and probably a lot more is promoted by experience in early childhood.
I put down my situation to having had pretty bright, if (professionally) underachieving, parents, and to my mother having accepted, from about my first birthday onwards, the help of an elderly lady (Mrs Knight) who looked after me every afternoon, reading to me so regularly and patiently that I could read before I began primary school at the age of 5 years. This happened partly because I was my mother’s eldest and because the first my younger brothers was born when I was just 18 months old so that my mother had to divide her attention between me and the new baby, so that I was left to my own devices and to Mrs Knight’s care for over 3 years. Mrs Knight was a simple soul, of Sussex stock, who happened to live in a cottage just across the road (Farthings Hill, Horsham) from my parents during my first seven years of life.
Do the IQ scores (meaning, if they never took such tests, the scores that they would have achieved had they done so) of parents have any correlation to those of their children? This has been a highly contentious question, known in the shorthand as the “nature or nurture?” question. It is still crucial to government education policy such as the policy of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments (1997–2009 at least) of aiming for a higher proportion of the population going to university, the business of whether students should have loans or grants from the public purse, and why the proportion of children from working class families who get to university is still much lower than from families in the other social classes in Britain.
Even more universally of interest, and extremely contentious, is the aspect of this question relating IQ to genes. There have been famous, some would say notorious, findings (or, at any rate, claims) from some researchers that populations from certain ethnic backgrounds correlate with different intelligence levels (mean or median IQ scores) from certain others. The reasons for the almost explosive contentiousness of such claims as those are obvious.
When the fact of my membership of Mensa came up in conversation (it rarely has done) with one of my brothers a few years ago, he asked (as people sometimes do) whether the idea of Mensa — a society with a high IQ membership condition — was not elitist. The subject got changed and we didn't really get to discuss the point. A starting question would (of course) be what he thought he meant by “elitist”. To me, it implies that Mensa has some political aim such as obtaining more power and influence in society than the numbers of its members would justify, and that is simply not what Mensa is about.
My reason for joining Mensa was social: with other Mensans, I am less likely than elsewhere to be told that I am boring, that I talk as if I have swallowed a dictionary, that I am showing off, and so on. This difference is important to me. I do not do “small talk” very well: I tend to want to talk about something more interesting than trivia such as which road I took to get somewhere, which is something that really happens and it not just a figment of the imagination of whoever wrote a certain sketch on the subject of pub bores some years ago. So, at a Mensa gathering, one is less likely than elsewhere to be told not to talk about really interesting but intellectually more demanding subjects, though it can still happen. One regular Mensa hostess used to ban the subject of computers at her parties because otherwise groups of men would settle out into huddles talking about systems or software or some such every time they met.
Mind you, even Mensans can be boring, and I dare say I am to many of them. I have certain interests but, with the instant availability on the web of almost limitless amounts of information on every topic in the world, passing information to each other is not as important as it might have been. What one tends to talk about is therefore opinion, value judgements, anecdotes and occurrences, unless conducting some sort of actual organized debate with an audience and a vote for a winner (such things can still happen).
How did a high IQ affect me before I knew about it? I guess that as one of only two children in my class at age 11 who passed the 11-plus and got to a grammar school, I might have had a clue. But that was really about the school's incompetence. From a class of 40 children there should have been 4, 10%. The class was (of course) far too large; that would have affected the result. But that I was the only boy (the other being a girl — duh) to pass was something. Yet two of my brothers also got to the same grammar school from the same primary school. Are they Mensa candidates? I don't know, but they are evidently also in the top 10%. After that the school system changed, and indeed eventually my parents moved house again,so my youngest brother and my sister had different external circumstances and I have no idea how they would have fared in comparison.
I gravitated, after one term in the second stream, to the top stream (of four) at the grammar school. That is, I rose; I seemed adept at the subjects like Latin that typified the education at that place. In the second year, our stream alone (though all streams were made to take Latin) was taken off geography and started on ancient Greek, at which I also did well. I even did Greek again later at university: having passed Greek O level at 15 and spent my Al level years doing maths and physics, I was allowed (5 years later, at age 20) to join a class of honours classics degree first years (who had, of course, all just passed Greek A level a mere three months before the autumn term began). The man who let me do that was Professor N.G.L. Hammond CBE, DSO, a most august scholar of Greek language and history as well as of modern Balkan languages, a remarkable explorer and distinguished special operations soldier. I had seen in a university brochure a reference to the classics first year Greek component being avaialbe to take as a subsidiary for other degree course. I went to see him (having enquired who decided such matters) and he asked me to write him a bit of Greek verse. Now for O level Latin (at least, at the Oxford and Cambridge board whose exams Wimbledon College boys sat at that time) one had had to learn about the rules of Latin prosody, but not so for O level Greek; so I looked it up and taught myself, then translated a short Pushkin poem from Russian into Attic hexameters. I remember going to the city's museum, which was just about next door to the main university building at the top of Park Street, where the classics department had its rooms. In the museum I found on show in a glass case a scrap of ancient parchment or something with contemporary writing on it. It was at any rate within a couple of centuries of the date of the works that classics students typically study (from printed text books of ancient Greek). I still have somewhere my manuscript of my bit of Greek verse and I definitely still have my Penguin anthology of Russian poetry with the two-stanza Pushkin poem.
Prof. Hammond was at least satisfied that I was capable of starting the course. Anyway, in the final the following May (or so) I got a mark equal (I gathered) to an upper second in that subject. That was better than I managed in maths, mainly because I was lazy and did too little work both that year and in year 2. THus I underachieved in my degree grade, probably because I had got used at school to being able to do the work without much effort (during my A level years) and because I had never stepped up my efforts again during year two at Bristol, when I should have been concentrating on being really at the top of my specialist subject, maths.
I could probably be said to have underachieved in my entire career since, except for a few occasions when I became a bit of a star or guru of some specialized IT subject in a small way. However, I reckon nowadays that I would never have wanted to become famous at anything. This might be sour grapes, but for various reasons I am rather glad to have remained obscure. I do not think I would have liked real fame of any sort.
(Note: At some point I should move this story into my autobiography!)
Even that escapade with the university classics department didn't really alert me to the fact that my brain was peculiar in any way. I suppose that I vaguely knew I was quite capable academically but I did not do the applied statistics: if it is true that the top 10% of the population used to get into a grammar school by passing the 11 plus, and I was in the top stream of four, then I should have been able to deduce at least that I was in the top 2.5% of the population in terms of academic achievement; and the 11 plus was quite similar to a traditional IQ test in terms of the sorts of question it posed. But I just did not know that, and I guess that I had never heard of the concept of IQ.
At age 26 I was working at ICL and my department manager, Peter Bloxsom, already a member of Mensa, suggested I apply to join as a way to meet bright ladies. That seemed a good idea to me; however, when I got around to doing so it was about June 1976, almost the end of my two years in that company. By the time I received my result and invitation to join, I had applied for a job in Paris, travelled there for interview and got the offer, and was due to emigrate to begin work there in the August. So I joined Mensa France. Getting up to speed in French so that I could participate in conversations with Mensans at their meetings in French was enough of a challenge to keep me interested to the point that I became fluent enough to pass — occasionally, since that era — for native speaker was one of the pleasing results of that period in my career.