Debunking the Bunk of IQ Tests
In an age that preaches “trust the science,” it’s amazing what we still accept without question. Case in point: IQ tests. We treat them as scientific fact. We cite them in textbooks. We whisper them like status symbols. But the IQ test, far from being a clean measure of intelligence, is a century-old tool of social control, long discredited by serious thinkers and still inexplicably propped up by academic institutions.
If science means anything, it means the willingness to revise what is false. So why haven’t we revised this?
The Scientific Method: A Brief Reminder
The scientific method, as it evolved from Francis Bacon, Galileo, and others, is a framework rooted in humility. Observe, hypothesize, test, revise. No result is sacred. No model is beyond questioning.
It’s not about clinging to tidy answers—it’s about relentlessly testing them. By that standard, the modern cult of IQ is not science. It’s dogma wrapped in a percentile.
IQ Was Invented to Help Kids—Then Turned Against Them
The IQ test wasn’t born evil. In 1905, French psychologist Alfred Binet created it to identify children who needed extra help in school. He stressed that intelligence was malleable—not fixed or innate. The test was a tool, not a judgment.
But in the U.S., Stanford’s Lewis Terman rewired its purpose. He coined the term “IQ,” declared it largely hereditary, and repurposed the test to sort people by supposed cognitive rank. IQ testing soon infiltrated the military, immigration policy, and public education.
What started as a diagnostic tool became a mechanism for exclusion—backed by bad science and worse politics.
The Retroactive Genius Lie
We’ve since turned IQ into mythology. How often have you heard that:
Einstein had an IQ of 160
da Vinci’s was 180
Stephen Hawking? 160 again
Marie Curie? Maybe 175?
Not one of these people took an IQ test. Most of them lived before the modern test even existed. These numbers are made up—pseudoscientific astrology for the academic elite.
Even more telling: Richard Feynman, the legendary physicist, scored around 125—above average, but not genius-tier by test standards. Apparently no one told his Nobel committee.
Beethoven Would Have Flunked—and Still Changed the World
Then there’s Ludwig van Beethoven, often painted as a tortured soul but rarely credited as an intellectual.
By academic standards, Beethoven was barely literate. His spelling was erratic, his grammar unstable. He devoured philosophy—but often through popularized or abridged digests. His Kant and Plato came, in effect, in the Reader’s Digest version.
But this wasn’t a deficit—it was a different kind of mind at work. Beethoven had a profound structural intelligence, a staggering grasp of harmony, tension, and form. He composed the Ninth Symphony while deaf. He reshaped the architecture of music itself.
By IQ test logic, he might have been dismissed as “low potential.” That should tell us everything we need to know about the limits of the metric.
Still Taught as Truth
So why does the IQ myth survive?
Because we institutionalized it. High school and college textbooks still describe IQ as a key measure of intelligence. Psychology courses chart bell curves with implicit hierarchies. There’s often little to no discussion of the test’s biases, historical abuses, or limited scope.
We tell students—implicitly or outright—that their minds can be ranked, compared, and boxed by a number. That’s not science. That’s a cultural script masquerading as objectivity.
Where Is the Scientific Outrage?
And where are the watchdogs of science?
The American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association release reams of literature on trauma, identity, neurodiversity, and beyond. But when it comes to IQ—a tool with a century of misuse and false claims—they whisper.
Where are the formal disavowals? The public retractions? The strongly worded editorials?
The institutions that tell the public to “trust the science” can’t seem to follow their own playbook when it’s inconvenient. When people question the need for measles vaccines, the public hears about it daily—from every scientific body, news outlet, and government agency. And rightly so.
So where is the same energy when it comes to debunking a flawed metric that shapes how millions of children are labeled, tracked, and judged? Where’s the coordinated, persistent correction campaign for that?
The Problem Isn’t the Test. It’s the Faith We Place in It.
To be clear: IQ tests can have limited diagnostic value. They may help identify certain learning profiles or cognitive challenges. But their broader use—as a marker of human potential, genius, or social value—is scientifically indefensible.
We are not our scores.
Real intelligence shows up in ways the test can’t reliably measure—even within the sciences. Feynman’s contributions to quantum electrodynamics, his problem-solving clarity, and his unmatched ability to explain complexity to others made him a once-in-a-century intellect.
That’s not test-taking. That’s brilliance.
Whether in physics or poetry, medicine or music, architecture or algebra, intelligence expresses itself through synthesis, insight, timing, metaphor, invention, and judgment. IQ tests measure a narrow slice—useful for certain things, but useless as a proxy for genius.
We’ve confused pattern recognition and test fluency with wisdom, creativity, and originality. That’s not measurement—it’s misdirection.
It’s time we stop teaching this bunk to students. Stop assigning fake IQs to dead geniuses. Stop ranking children like racehorses. And start treating the human mind with the complexity—and humility—it deserves.