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The thick of it: Is Boris Johnson right when he says that equality is impossible because some people's IQs are too low?
Intellect can be measured in other ways, says Steve Connor
Those who know him say that Boris Johnson is an intelligent man. If he took an IQ test tomorrow he would no doubt score in the top 5 per cent, especially if the questions were set in Latin. He is by all accounts smart, bright, clever and cunning - the latter being especially useful for a politician and serial philanderer.
Johnson's wit and mental alacrity are indisputable. He is widely read, well-educated (Eton and Oxford) and a skilled raconteur who can tell a good joke. But there are other ways of describing intelligence that may not seem quite so apt for the accident-prone London Mayor.
How many people, for instance, would happily describe him as wise or sensible? And surely he would hardly score above average for emotional intelligence or the ability to empathise with other human beings, especially those less fortunate and privileged than himself.
Nick Clegg said yesterday that Johnson displayed "careless elitism" when advocating that more should be done to help the intelligent wealth-creators of society, and that Johnson was being "fairly unpleasant" by talking about people as if they were a breed of dog.
What so offended Clegg was Johnson's description of the innate intellectual inequality of humans, especially those "of our species" with the lowest IQ scores. When he delivered the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture on Wednesday evening, Johnson said that humans were far from being equal in "raw ability".
"Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent... have an IQ above 130," Johnson told his audience.
But any discussion of IQ tests should consider their value. What are they actually measuring, how well do they do it and what does the end result really mean?
Whenever politicians talk about intelligence and IQ, they risk being drawn into a quagmire of controversy going back over half a century. One of the problems is that experts themselves cannot agree on what is meant by intelligence, how to measure it and what that IQ metric actually stands for.
Leaving aside the word itself, and all its different connotations of cognitive ability, a universal scientific definition of intelligence does not seem to exist. Indeed, when two dozen prominent psychological theorists were asked to define intelligence in the 1980s, they came up with two dozen somewhat different definitions.