IQ Info

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A term referring to a variety of mental capabilities, including the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.
Throughout the 20th century scientists have debated the nature of intelligence, including its heritability and whether (and to what extent) it exists or is measurable. The 1994 publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's volume The Bell Curve brought these debates to the forefront of public attention by discussing links between social class, race, and IQ scores, despite the fact that many have questioned the validity of IQ tests as a measurement of intelligence or a predictor of achievement and success.
Although the assessment of mental abilities through standardized testing has had many detractors, especially over the past 30 years, the notion that intellect is a measurable entity--also called the psychometric approach--lies at the heart of much modern theorizing about the nature of intelligence. A rudimentary forerunner to 20th-century intelligence testing was developed in the 1860s by Charles Darwin's younger cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who, inspired by On the Origin of Species, set out to prove that intelligence was inherited, using quantitative studies of prominent individuals and their families. Galton's work was followed in 1905 by that of French psychologist Alfred Binet, who introduced the concept of mental age, which would match chronological age in children of average ability. It would exceed chronological age in bright children and would be below in those of lesser ability. Binet's test was introduced to the United States in a modified form in 1916, and with it the concept of the intelligence quotient (mental age divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100).
In the meantime, one of the central concepts of the psychometric approach to intelligence had been introduced in England in 1904 by Charles Spearman, who ...