A quick comment: An IQ score on any test above IQ 160 is not a validated score, and should be considered comparable to IQ scores in the usual range on current, carefully validated tests of 40 to 160. Moreover, the standard form of scoring IQ tests does not, and cannot, yield an IQ score with interval characteristics, as Terman and Merrill (1937, p. 25) recognized.

"The expression of a test result in terms of age norms is simple and unambiguous, resting upon no statistical assumptions. A test so scaled does not pretend to measure intelligence as a linear distance is measured by the equal units of a foot-rule, but tells us merely that the ability of a given subject corresponds to the average ability of children of such and such an age. This was all that Binet claimed to accomplish, and one can well doubt whether the voluminous output of psychometric literature since his day has enabled us to accomplish more. We have accordingly chosen to retain this least pretentious of units for the estimation of mental level."

The numbers yielded by an IQ test are not measures, but rather more like decathlon scores (Hunt 1997). Indeed, IQ scores analogize quite aptly to the arbitrary rating numbers assigned by college rating guides to different colleges and universities, even in how they differ from one brand of IQ test to another.

The earliest mental tester, Galton, recognized that he had no "foot rule." Early on, he was frustrated by the lack of an "external standard of measurement" for what he was investigating, and resolved to report his results as a rank-ordering of subjects, without a "foot-rule" (Galton 1880). The best considered view is that IQ tests and other mental ability tests are not measures at all. Certainly they should not be analogized to rulers. An IQ score, despite the analogies appealed to by some authors, is not like a marking on a ruler related to an absolute scale but is on an ordinal scale (Mackintosh 1998, pp. 30-31). Alfred Binet warned against this error early on, writing, "This scale properly speaking does not permit the measure of the intelligence, [1] because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured, but are on the contrary, a classification, a hierarchy among diverse intelligences;" (Binet 1905, English translation 1916).

See also

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html

for background on high-IQ societies and their founders.

After edit: I can also provide a reference to specifically disagree with one statement in the submitted article. "Wechsler is saying quite plainly that those with IQs above 150 are different in kind from those below that level. He is saying that they are a different kind of mind, a different kind of human being." But David Feldman (1984), in a specialized study of study subjects who scored above 180 on their IQ tests, noted:

"Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of ‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric and to variables other than IQ."

REFERENCES

Binet, Alfred. (1916). New methods for the diagnosis of the intellectual level of subnormals. In E. S. Kite (Trans.), The Development of Intelligence in Children. Vineland, NJ: Publications of the Training School at Vineland. (Originally published 1905 in L'Année Psychologique, 12, 191-244.) (Available on the Web at Classics in the History of Psychology site http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Binet/binet1.htm ).

Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523.

Galton, Francis (1880). Statistics of Mental Imagery. Mind, 5, 301-318. Received May 12, 2006 from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

Hunt, Earl (1997). The Concept and Utility of Intelligence. In Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Fienberg, Daniel P. Resnick & Kathryn Roeder (Eds.). Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Mackintosh, N. J. (1998). IQ and Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.