The Genius Explosion

One of the Darwinian delights of coeducation and rising college-entrance standards is that the smartest 10% of young Americans are now thrown to gether on campuses at the most susceptible age for romance and marriage.

The genetic consequence, reports Physicist John R. Platt in the University of Chicago magazine Context, is a zooming output of high-IQ children. "These marriages are now producing five or ten times the total number of 150s, for example, that we would get from perfectly random marriages in the normal population," where IQ averages 100.

"Even more spectacular children," he says, "may becoming out of the intellectual colonies like Oak Ridge or Los Alamos, where one man in six has a Ph.D., and out of the faculty communities of the great universities, where all the men and many of the women have advanced degrees." In the common -- or uncommon--schools of such centers, says Platt, "whole classes of 130s and 140s may be seen, from kindergarten through high school." Among the results: a 13-year-old studying atomic physics seriously, an eleven-year-old taking college courses, an eight-year-old doing graduate work in mathematics.

"In the general population, only one person in 300 reaches the 140 level. But if whole communities reach an average of 140," asks Platt, "does one child in 300 reach 180? And one in 2,000 reach 190? If this turns out to be so, we may not have to wait centuries for the next Newton; we may have a dozen within 20 years. The number of 180s getting out of college in the next few years may not be a mere dozen, but hundreds. It could be an explosion of genius such as the world has never seen."

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