05-11-2008, 06:12 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-11-2008, 06:16 PM by Bharatvarsh.)
The person who developed the first IQ test was Alfred Binet a Frenchman in early 1900s, he wanted it to help identify kids who needed special education in the then overcrowded French classrooms. It was brought to US by Lewis Terman. In US new tests were developed, and soon some of them were used as support for eugenics programs while it lasted. Since then the tests have been improved because they tried to tease out the blatant cultural bias evident in earlier tests and deemphasize acquired knowledge.
By the way there are phenomena which still remain unexplained and challenge our common ideas of intelligence. I am talking about autistic savants (a small proportion of the overall autistic population) who have extraordinary memory abilities but in real life are classified as "mentally retarded" and often cannot function on their own, some of these people have very good musical abilities or talent with calenders (for example if you ask them what day of the week June 9 1979 was, they can answer). We don't have a satisfying explanation for how they do this, this was shown in the Hollywood movie Rainman starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise (if anyone is more interested in "strange" phenomena like these check out the online videos on youtube of Vilayanur Ramachandran and his other works).
By the way there are phenomena which still remain unexplained and challenge our common ideas of intelligence. I am talking about autistic savants (a small proportion of the overall autistic population) who have extraordinary memory abilities but in real life are classified as "mentally retarded" and often cannot function on their own, some of these people have very good musical abilities or talent with calenders (for example if you ask them what day of the week June 9 1979 was, they can answer). We don't have a satisfying explanation for how they do this, this was shown in the Hollywood movie Rainman starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise (if anyone is more interested in "strange" phenomena like these check out the online videos on youtube of Vilayanur Ramachandran and his other works).