"The Essex blonde...who's officially smarter than Albert Einstein!"

A friend sent this article about a British girl, Lauren Marbe, who is evidently from a lower middle class background and has normal (plebeian) tastes, but whose IQ has been tested at 161.

The article, from the Mail Online, has a somewhat breathlesss tone, as if the author can't quite believe that such a towering intellect as Marbe would come across like such a normal girl, the type who likes to put blonde highlights in her hair and watch the usual run of TV shows -- although she does plan to apply to Cambridge, where she would like to study architecture

As far as her being smarter than Einstein, I think we'll just have to wait and let history be the judge of that.

But as ridiculous as the comparison of Marbe to Einstein is, the most annoying thing about the article is the chart it provides listing the IQ's of the following famous people: 

Charles Dickens - 180

Dr. David Livingstone - 170

Charles Darwin - 165

Stephen Hawking - 160

Quentin Tarantino 160

Bill Gates - 160

Albert Einstein - 160

Sharon Stone - 154

Bill Clinton - 145

Shakira - 140

JFK - 119

These IQ figures are supposedly excerpted from a well known list of estimated IQ's of historical figures by American psychologist Catharine Cox Miles. The only problem is, Miles died in 1984 (I looked her up), so she couldn't have come up with the numbers for Hawking, Tarantino, Gates, Stone, Clinton, or Shakira. 

Some of those numbers are self-reported, and therefore highly suspect. Sharon Stone has claimed an IQ of 160 (not 154), but she also said that she went to a MENSA school as a child, and it turned out that those schools did not exist when she would have been at an age to attend. (Sociopath alert!)

Quentin Tarantino's IQ has been bruited about ever since he directed Pulp Fiction, but it's unclear what kind of test it was, and what kind of conditions it was administered under. Since it was his mother who originally boasted about his IQ, my guess is that she is the one who gave him the test. 

As far as Hawking's and Gates's IQ's, those sound like suspiciously round numbers that were just randomly assigned to them. It's hard to believe that they themselves went to the trouble to take the tests and then publicize the results. (If you're the world's leading physicist or the world's richest man, you don't really have to boast about your IQ.)

Bill Clinton's number actually seems too low. He may be a sociopath, but he was an awfully smart one. Maybe some of that perceived intelligence was just glibness passing itself off as smarts, but his command of facts (as well as fiction, when it suited him) was legendary.

As far as the 119 figure for JFK before, that number is probably based on the "Gentleman's C" average Kennedy got at Harvard. Yes, he was a lazy playboy who didn't apply himself when young, but that only means that he was lazy. I've known plenty of people with IQ's in that range, and as Lloyd Bentsen once famously said, they were no Jack Kennedy's. 

Shakira's 140 sounds like a number her agent came up with in an attempt to broaden her appeal. I Googled her IQ, but could find no proof of it, only several mentions of the number. It seems that once such a number gets attached to someone famous, it just sticks, no questions asked. (Shakira's hips may not lie, but most likely someone is lying, about her IQ.)

And how does Livingstone get ranked ahead of Einstein and Darwin? He discovered the source of the Nile, so deserves high scores for bravery, but bravery does not necessarily connote intelligence, in fact sometimes it can mean the opposite. His score sounds almost like a misinterpretation of Stanley's famous quote: "Dr. Livingstone, 170 IQ I presume?" 

And speaking of presumptuous, who was it who felt qualified to judge the IQ's of Einstein, Darwin, and Dickens? It's always seemed to me that it's very hard for anyone to estimate the IQ of someone far smarter than he. (How can you judge someone you don't fully understand?)

Assigning an iQ to Charles Dickens which is 15 points higher than Charles Darwin seems both arbitrary and meaningless. How could anybody possibly know that? Also, Dickens may have been a great writer, but Darwin is by far the more important, and influential, thinker. He came up with a unique and revolutionary theory which changed the way humans saw themselves.

I've heard that any points beyond 145 don't really make all that much difference for creative geniuses anyway, and that what distinguishes really special people is some unique undefinable spark, a special twist of mind, that can't be measured by an ordinary test. This could well be true.

Perhaps Lauren Marbe has that spark. Only time will tell. 

Oh, and for the overly gullible writer of the Mail Online article: my IQ is 350. Hey, I said it, so it must be true, right? You believed Sharon Stone and Shakira's self-reported numbers, so believe mine.

At 350, I'm smarter than Dickens and Darwin put together.

I may not have produced anything more of value than Marbe has of yet, but that doesn't matter. It's the number that counts.