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Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
life or death. In Atkins v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court found a person
with mental disability, defined as having an IQ of less than 80, cannot be
executed.
IQ is not really a measurement, in the normal sense. Most
measurements in life are absolute, for example, distance, weight, and time.
I can prove my house is bigger than yours using a tape measure. We each
ensure our measures are the same by calibrating them against a common
reference. In the 1900s we could have walked down to the local town hall
and checked our measurements against a 'yardstick. As measurements
became standardized, these sticks were compared with a common central
reference. For example, the metre was a platinum-iridium bar kept at the
Pavillon de Breteuil near Paris. In the 1960s, a laser superseded the metal
reference, and today a metre is defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the
orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of krypton-86
in a vacuum. Measurement has become very precise!
Intelligence is different. It has no yardstick. If I were to ask, "How
much intelligence does it take to design a building?" there's no simple
answer. IQ is not an absolute measurement it's a relative score. Test
100 people and list their scores in order. The ones in the middle get a
score of 100; the top 5 a score of at least 130 and the top person a score
of 140. Similarly at the lower end. A person with a high IQ is probably
smarter than one with a low IQ, but it doesn't tell you if the building
they designed will stand up. It's rather like quoting the odds of a horse
winning the Derby. Quoting the odds does not give the speed of the
horse, nor often the winner of the race!
Despite attempts by test creators to remove cultural bias, it can
never be completely eliminated. Certain Amazonian tribes have no
concept of counting above five. For them, numbers are an alien idea and
serve no useful purpose in their habitat. In the jungle there are always
enough trees to make spears, and as a hunter-gatherer you simply need
to know where to find your prey. There is no need to count animals into
an enclosure at night. Another interesting environment is the Australian
Outback. Aboriginal Australians appear to have a remarkable aptitude for
visio-spatial memory and can remember maps or collections of objects
much better than you or I. Tests for this skill involve playing a variant
of Pelmanism. A collection of objects is placed on a tray and covered
with a cloth. The cloth is lifted for 60 seconds to reveal the location and
type of objects and then replaced. Subjects are then given a bucket full of
objects and asked to recreate the tray. You and I do a modest job. Native
Australians do this almost perfectly. Why?
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