Here's what I was thinking of lately: how closely is intelligence (or for empirical purposes: IQ) tied to a persons ability and desire to innovate? (by innovate I mean "create or discover something new, whether scientific or artistic).

Will someone with an IQ of 90 be able to become a successful scientist or mathematician? How about a musician or a poet? An engineer?

Is it feasible for them to work on these jobs without impairment, or will choosing this sort of career become a constant struggle to meet the minimum standards?

And if it's the latter, then what's the minimum level of IQ required for people to take these jobs? 100? 120? 150?

Any opinions?

(P.S. Just in case, yes there's a big difference between "intelligence" and "IQ", but at least the latter's quantitative.)

success in science correlates with IQ. Someone with IQ 150 is much more likely to be successful and more innovative than someone with IQ 100.

But is it the level of IQ that is fundamental to the level of innovation? Afterall, the correllation is not perfect and alone leaves one with many valid questions.

The Artistic Trojan-Horse hypothesis:

Artistic creativity is useful for designing, and is not quantified by IQ tests, yet rears its ugly head when it has the opportunity to access and improve on technological know-how in the mind of a person who also happens to have an IQ of 150, and is thus able to pass the exams and work with such technology.

open-mindedness

correlation doesn't imply causality. It's more a matter of probability. People with higher IQ have a higher probability of being more innovative.

What about causality then? Is high IQ a pre-requisite for innovation? Or can one have the latter without the former?

One can have innovation without the IQ but its just not as probable.

Well take autism, some autistics can score very high on some symbolic IQ tests, but common-sense and relation to the real world can be completely missing. This is similar to myself, who has had to struggle to relate to the world with common sense, but not to academic pursuits. Although I'm not classified as autistic, I do have some of the 'symptoms' that are looked for.

But high-IQ is only a guideline to real intelligence. Its a little like calories in food, its simply an educated guess from extrapolated data. You can lose weight from eating only ice cream, which breaks most peoples idea of calories.

People can do extremely well in life and business with things such as dyslexia and OCD, with OCD being 'irrational' to most people. Also I think innovation is the spark of divinity which has caused us to inherit this Earth. Innovation comes from the multitudes of variety and associated thinking. I'm sure many 'stupid' people have had a brilliant idea. What is interesting is if brilliant and world changing ideas form in a person incapable of conveying those ideas, what a loss to the world that would be.

one must avoid confusing probability stats with edited interpretations of probability stats.

the probabilistic bias towards higher IQ for innovation is explicable, but not in terms of innovative ability but in terms of a disproportionate access to technological research know-how and environments.

artistic creativity levels in general and IQ levels have yet to be mapped on to each other. measurement is problematic.

simply put people with a higher IQ have higher probability of being in such environments.. and therefore happen to be engaged with the culture of technological innovation.

it may take more, or different teaching to allow a person with a lower IQ to have enough knowledge to begin considering principle changes to existing technology. but once the artistic creativity can engage.. the probability bias may evaporate.

one can have innovation outside of the innovation-geared environments but its just not as probable.

the probability stats don't measure anything about innovation and IQ in isolation... so it's prejudicial to mention IQ and innovation alone in probabilistic terms

We all know what IQ tests are, and that they are the active deciphering of logical relations fair to say, ok but lets go back lets isolate the topics were discussing here as this is science, so first logic is entirely dependent on innovation and/or creativity and this acan be easily proven we were all at one point clueless monkeys running around beating animals and getting food, when a caveman had two apples what made him realize this was true this was not an innate process logic is like climbing a ladder one idea to the next but innovation and or creativity is putting the ladder their in the first place, everything we have today was created logically through innivative reasoning and practices, and therefore I believe we can say that IQ is correlated directly with how well one can climb a ladder but some people just can't figure out how to get to the top in the first place. peace out