I don't know how many of you watch the
program "The Fifth Estate", but there was something on it a few weeks ago
which I simply can't get out of my head. It had to do with the smartest
people, though not necessarily the cleverest, in the US; that is, the people
who registered the highest IQ scores when they were kids. The very
highest was not, as one might expect, a prof at Harvard or Stanford, but a
muscle bound middle aged bouncer who worked at a night club for $6,000 a
year. When he was a kid, his IQ was recorded at something over 195 (100
is average), higher than Einstein's. Apparently, he never did anything
academic. He came from a very poor family in Minnesota or North Dakota
and had to quit school at a very early age. But true to his innate
talents, when he is not bouncing he, is working on a book on the relationship
between the human personality and the universe. He has a girlfriend who
has a Ph.D. in something very essoteric.
There was another guy on the program whose IQ
was nearly as high - e.g. 190+. He was a middle aged biker, complete
with Harley, leathers and long flowing blond hair. He is something of a
cult figure among his fellow bikers because he is very good at figuring things
out. Like the bouncer, he too came from a poor background and never did
anything academic.
All of which leads to my point. Since
seeing the program, I've been thinking about some of the smartest people I've
known. I won't include my family and friends, who I know are severely,
perhaps even tragically, gifted, so I don't have to say anything about
them. I just want to talk about people outside of my immediate
circle. So here is my list:
Albert Peter, a Yukon Indian
from Mayo, about thirty when I worked with him, a very nice and ordinary guy,
slight of build, a man you would ignore on the street. When I worked
with the Yukon Indians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of our meetings
got extremely muddled. We couldn't figure out where we had come from or
where we were heading and sat there bickering over silly little points.
Finally, Albert, who had sat there in silence all the while, would get up,
walk over to the white board, pick up a marker, and draw a diagram. He
would say something like "This is where you started. Here is where you
are. This is where you want to go." He would do it in the
most friendly and non-critical way possible and was right every
time. Every time! He would then humbly sit down, the meeting
would continue for a little while, we would get to the point he said we
would get to, and we would have agreement. That he was an organizational
genius of some kind was unquestionable. He had no academic training
apart from a couple of courses on aircraft maintenance, but he had been raised
by his grandfather, a highly regarded medicine person.
Hank Neufeld, a kid from
remote northern Alberta, who worked in the sawmill at Ocean Falls, B.C., for a
time. Hank had a bad leg and would limp quite noticeably. He never
went to university and probably never even finished High School, but he had
memorized the whole of Shakespeare. He knew every line of every play and
every line of every sonnet. During our lunch breaks, he would quote from
various plays for half an hour at a time, explaining little nuances to us -
like why Shakespeare put it this way and not that, and what he may have
meant by it and how it would have been received in Elizabethan
times. He should have been lecturing at UBC or Harvard and not in a
sawmill in Ocean Falls. But with no credentials except his rather
profound brain, that is where he was, in a sawmill in an out-of-the-way
place. And we all suspect that it's credentials, not brains,
that matter.
A hotel clerk in New Delhi,
India. Mrs. Gandhi had just been assassinated, all hell had
broken loose, and Europeans and North Americans wanted to get out, fast!
Milling about the hotel reception desk, they were all trying to convert their
rupees into their domestic currencies and pay their accounts. The clerk
was accommodating them - keeping order, adding up accounts, converting
currencies, making change, all in his head without putting pen or pencil to
paper! Very few people realized what he was doing, but those of us who
did simply stood back and marveled, realizing that we were seeing something of
the ultimate of human capacity!
So, this is my paean to genius. It is
where you find it, and that is not necessarily where you expect
to.
Ed
