jimfromtx wrote:
That's smarter than Marilyn Vos Savant and Stephen Hawking put together smart!
Well, not quite. Ms. Vos Savant's IQ is somewhere above 200, so they say. No idea what Mr. Hawking's might be. Really, though, the tests a horrifically inaccurate above 180 or so. (Not that they mean much of anything in the first place since they're so often heavily culturally biased.) A lot of real IQ tests can't measure anything higher than 150. IQs above that are just as often measured by behavior and demonstrated skills as by controlled testing.
And for the record, above 120 (might be 115) is considered gifted, and 150 and above is genius. And a lot of people with IQs over 170 can't function at an appropriate level because of social and interpersonal-relation difficulties. Others learn at an early age to scale abilities down to not stand out as much, and never quite regain a practical use of their native intelligence.
Plenty of extremely smart people are doing things other than curing cancer. If nothing else, plenty of extremely smart people aren't good at biology, or medicine, or just don't enjoy those subjects.
All rambling and ranting aside, it's possible. Not terribly likely, simply because the percentage of people that actually have IQs that high is infinitesimally small, but it's still possible.