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
