Michael Dowling, 13, is working on his fourth fantasy novel with the help of his mother, an Oxford don in English, under the pen name of Tobias Druitt.  However, the main reason Michael Dowling has gotten the attention he has in the popular media, especially in Great Britain, is his IQ of 170.  People are calling him smarter than Einstein, whose IQ has been estimated to be around 160 (despite the fact that Albert Einstein never took an IQ test and that IQ scores are typically tallied in such a way that a score of 160 in the forties is not equivalent to a score of 160 nowadays), and reporters are falling over themselves to get Dowling's opinions on everything from particle physics to the virtues of home-made potato chips.

I will attempt to be nice to young Dowling, as none of this is his fault.  It is hard, though, because I am jealous that he was gifted with an Oxford don in English as a mother, thereby ensuring his ability to find a publisher.  I've been writing since I was younger than Dowling, and yet I'm still unpublished; I do not attribute the difference to IQ, but to luck and circumstance.  (And yes, I am bitter.)

IQ, you see, is not a measure of a person's worth.  Even more startling is that it is not a measure of a person's intelligence.  When the idea of an intelligence quotient was first conceived by the likes of Willain Stern, Alfred Binet, and Theodore Simon, it was originally designed to be a test of a child's academic potential.  It was not originally designed to measure a person's innate intelligence, and it has never succeeded in doing that.

READ MORE...