A 1994 summary of Cox’s IQs by Dean Simonton. [2]

See main: Cattell 1000

1-100	101-200	201-301
1. Goethe (IQ=210) 2. Leibnitz (IQ=205) 3. Grotius (IQ=200) 4. Wolsey (IQ=200) ----------------------------------------- 5. Pascal (IQ=195) 6. Sarpi (IQ=195) ----------------------------------------- 7. Newton (IQ=190) 8. Laplace (IQ=190) 9. Voltaire (IQ=190) 10. Schelling (IQ=190) 11. Arnauld (IQ=190) 12. Berkeley (IQ=190) 13. Haller (IQ=190) 14. Melanchthon (IQ=190) 15. Pitt (the Younger) (IQ=190) ----------------------------------------- 16. Galileo (IQ=185) 17. Lagrange (IQ=185) 18. Davy (IQ=185) 19. D'Alembert (IQ=185) 18. Comte (IQ=185) 17. Campanella (IQ=185) 21. Gassendi (IQ=185) 22. Humboldt, the Younger (IQ=185) 24. Leopardi (IQ=185) 25. Mirabeau (IQ=185) 26. Niebuhr (IQ=185) ----------------------------------------- 27. Da Vinci (IQ=180) 29. Descartes (IQ=180) 30. Bacon (IQ=180) 30. Michelangelo (IQ=180) 31.Mill (IQ=180) 32. Byron (IQ=180) 33. Arago (IQ=180) 34. Bailly (IQ=180) 35. Bentham (IQ=180) 36. Bossuet (IQ=180) 37. Brougham (IQ=180) 38. Chattterton (IQ=180) 39. Condorcet (IQ=180) 40. Dickens (IQ=180) 41. Erasmus (IQ=180) 42. Fenelon (IQ=180) 43. Gibbon (IQ=180) 44. Hugo (IQ=180) 45. Liebig (IQ=180) 46. Malebranche (IQ=180) 47. Milton (IQ=180) 48. Musset (IQ=180) 49. Oersted (IQ=180) 50. Peel (IQ=180) 51. Pope (IQ=180) 52. Scalinger (IQ=180) 53. Stael (IQ=180) 54. Tasso (IQ=180) ----------------------------------------- 55. Huygens (IQ=175) 56. Kepler (IQ=175) ● Kant (IQ=175) 57. Spinoza (IQ=175) 58. Gay-Lussac (IQ=175) 59. Humboldt, W. (IQ=175) 60. Bunsen (IQ=175) 61. Spenser (IQ=175) 62. Adams, J. Q. (IQ=175) 63. Agassiz (IQ=175) 64. Bichat (IQ=175) 65. Buffon (IQ=175) 66. Calvin (IQ=175) 67. Cardan (IQ=175) 68. Coleridge (IQ=175) 69. Cuvier (IQ=175) 70. Jonson, B. (IQ=175) 71. Lamennais (IQ=175) 72. Macaulay (IQ=175) 73. Southey, R. (IQ=175) 74. Thou (IQ=175) 75. Vega, de (IQ=175) 76. Wolf, F.A. (IQ=175) ----------------------------------------- 77. Lavoisier (IQ=170) 78. Faraday (IQ=170) 79. Carnot (IQ=170) 80. Hamilton (IQ=170) 81. Atterbury (IQ=170) 82. Bentley (IQ=170) 83. Calderon (IQ=170) 84. Canope (IQ=170) 85. Chalmers (IQ=170) 86. Chalmers (IQ=170) 87. Constant (IQ=170) 88. Fichte (IQ=170) 89. Handel (IQ=170) 90. Irving W. (IQ=170) 91. Kotzebue (IQ=170) 92. Longfellow (IQ=170) 93. Luther (IQ=170) 94. Marat (IQ=170) 95. Metastasio (IQ=170) 96. Napier (IQ=170) 97. Penn (IQ=170) 98. Racine (IQ=170) 99. Raphael (IQ=170) 100. Renan (IQ=170)	101. Reuchlin (IQ=170) 102. Robespierre (IQ=170) 103. Smith, A. (IQ=170) 104. Strauss (IQ=170) 105. Tennyson (IQ=170) 106. Turgot (IQ=170) 107. Velasquez (IQ=170) 108. Vergniaud (IQ=170) 109. Wagner (IQ=170) 110. Wieland (IQ=170) ----------------------------------------- 111.Boerhaave (IQ=165) 112.Darwin (IQ=165) 113.Watt (IQ=165) 114.Diderot (IQ=165) 115.Beethoven (IQ=165) 116.Bach (IQ=165) 117. Addison (IQ=165) 118. Bayle (IQ=165) 119. Beaumarchais (IQ=165) 120. Beza (IQ=165) 121. Bronte, C. (IQ=165) 122. Burnet (IQ=165) 123. Canning (IQ=165) 124. DeFoe (IQ=165) 125. Disraeli (IQ=165) 126. Fielding (IQ=165) 127. Fouche (IQ=165) 128. Guicciardini (IQ=165) 129. Guizot (IQ=165) 130. Guizot (IQ=165) 131. Hastings (IQ=165) 132. Hegel (IQ=165) 133. Heine (IQ=165) 134. Herder (IQ=165) 135. Herschel, W. (IQ=165) 136. Hobbes (IQ=165) 137. Holberg, L. von (IQ=165) 138. Jenner (IQ=165) 139. Johnson (IQ=165) 140. Law (IQ=165) 141. Linnaeus (IQ=165) 142. Locke (IQ=165) 143. Mazzini (IQ=165) 144. Mendelssohn (IQ=165) 145. Montaigne (IQ=165) 146. Mozart (IQ=165) 147. Newman, J.H. (IQ=165) 148. Priestley (IQ=165) 149.Raleigh (IQ=165) 150. Robertson (IQ=165) 151. Sainte-Beuve (IQ=165) 152.Schiller (IQ=165) 153. Scott (IQ=165) 154. Shaftesbury (IQ=165) 155. Sheridan, R.B. (IQ=165) 156. St. Simon (IQ=165) 157. Swedenborg (IQ=165) 158. Tieck (IQ=165) 159. Weber (IQ=165) 160. Webster (IQ=165) 161. Winckelmann (IQ=165) 162. Wordsworth (IQ=165) 163. Zwingli (IQ=165) ----------------------------------------- 164. Alfieri (IQ=160) 165. Andrewes (IQ=160) 166. Berzelius (IQ=160) 167.Boyle (IQ=160) 168. Bunyan (IQ=160) 169. Canova (IQ=160) 170. Channing (IQ=160) 171. Chateaubriand (IQ=160) 172. Chesterfield (IQ=160) 173. Claredon (IQ=160) 174. Clarke, S. (IQ=160) 175. Copernicus (IQ=160) 176. Corneille (IQ=160) 177. Cowper (IQ=160) 178. Dryden (IQ=160) 179. Dupin (IQ=160) 180. Eliot, G. (IQ=160) 181. Etienne (IQ=160) 182. Franklin, B. (IQ=160) 183. Gaskell, E.C.S. (IQ=160) 184. Grimm, J.L. (IQ=160) 185. Grote (IQ=160) 186. Haydn (IQ=160) 187. Helvetius (IQ=160) 188. Hunter (IQ=160) 189. Jansen (IQ=160) 190. Jefferson (IQ=160) 191. Lamartine (IQ=160) 192. Lessing (IQ=160) 193. L'Hopital (IQ=160) 194. Madison (IQ=160) 195. Martineau, H. (IQ=160) 196. Mazarin (IQ=160) 197. Moliere (IQ=160) 198. Richelieu (IQ=160) 199. Rubens (IQ=160) 200. Sand (IQ=160)	201. Schleiermacher (IQ=160) 202. Sevigne (IQ=160) 203. Sumner, C. (IQ=160) 204. Thiers (IQ=160) 205. Wesley (IQ=160) ----------------------------------------- 206. Adams, J. (IQ=155) 207. Ait Weil Zade (IQ=155) 208. Balzac (IQ=155) 209. Baxter (IQ=155) 210. Beranger (IQ=155) Bulwer (IQ=155) Cervantes (IQ=155) Pitt (the Younter) (IQ=155) Cervantes (IQ=155) Cobden (IQ=155) Danton (IQ=155) Durer (IQ=155) Emerson (IQ=155) Fox, G. J. (IQ=155) Fox, George (IQ=155) Fulton, R. (IQ=155) Gambetta, L.M. (IQ=155) Hamilton, A. (IQ=155) Hawthorne, N. (IQ=155) La Fontaine (IQ=155) Maintenon (IQ=155) Miller, Hugh (IQ=155) More (IQ=155) Necker (IQ=155) O’Connell (IQ=155) Palestrina (IQ=155) Pitt (the Elder) (IQ=155) Prescott (IQ=155) Rembrandt (IQ=155) Savonarola (IQ=155) Seward (IQ=155) Swift (IQ=155) Temple, W. (IQ=155) Van Dyck (IQ=155) Walpole (IQ=155) Warburton (IQ=155) Wilberforce (IQ=155) Blake, H. (IQ=155) -------------------------- Bright (IQ=150) Burns (IQ=150) Cobbett (IQ=150) Franklin (IQ=150) Lincoln (IQ=150) Marmont (IQ=150) Moore (IQ=150) Murillo (IQ=150) Nelson (IQ=150) Rousseau (IQ=150) Soult (IQ=150) Thackeray (IQ=150) Wilkes (IQ=150) --------------- Alberoni (IQ=145) Anderson, H. C. (IQ=145) Blucher (IQ=145) Garrison, W.L. (IQ=145) Gluck (IQ=145) Hogarth (IQ=145) Jackson, A. (IQ=145) Marlborough (IQ=145) Meheme Ali (IQ=145) Moreau (IQ=145) Napoleon (IQ=145) Poussin (IQ=145) Reynolds (IQ=145) Rossini (IQ=145) Sherman (IQ=145) ---------------------- Bernadotte (IQ=140) Clive (IQ=140) Cortez (IQ=140) Garibaldi (IQ=140) Lee, R.E. (IQ=140) Monk (IQ=140) Vauban (IQ=140) Washington (IQ=140) + 11 more below 140

“The American hereditarian Lewis Terman, the man most responsible for instituting IQ tests in America, retrospectively calculated Gallon's IQ at above 200, but accorded only 135 to Darwin and a mere 100-110 to Copernicus (see pp. 213-218 on this ludicrous incident in the history of mental testing). Darwin, who approached hereditarian arguments with strong suspicion, wrote after reading Hereditary Genius: ‘You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work’ (in Galton, 1909, p. 290). Galton responded: ‘The rejoinder that might be made to his remark about hard work, is that character, including the aptitude for work, is heritable like every other faculty’.”

● Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) (IQ:185|#58) [RGM:21|1,260+] (Cattell 1000:341)
● Charles Darwin (1809-1882) (IQ:180|#104) [RGM:13|1,260+] (Cattell 1000:116)
● Francis Galton (1822-1911) (IQ:145|#472) [RGM:325|1,260+] (Cattell 1000:N/A)

“Fossil IQ's of past geniuses: Society may need masses of the "merely inferior" to run its machines, Terman believed, but its ultimate health depends upon the leadership of rare geniuses with elevated IQ's. Terman and his associates published a five-volume series on Genetic Studies of Genius in an attempt to define and follow people at the upper end of the Stanford-Binet scale.

In one volume, Terman decided to measure, retrospectively, the IQ of history's prime movers—its statesmen, soldiers, and intellectuals. If they ranked at the top, then IQ is surely the single measure of ultimate worth. But how can a fossil IQ be recovered without conjuring up young Copernicus and asking him what the white man was riding? Undaunted, Terman and his colleagues tried to reconstruct the IQ of past notables, and published a thick book (Cox, 1926) that must rank as a primary curiosity within a literature already studded with absurdity—though Jensen (1979, pp. 113 and 355) and others still take it seriously.

Terman (1917) had already published a preliminary study of Francis Galton and awarded a staggering IQ of 200 to this pioneer of mental testing. He therefore encouraged his associates to proceed with a larger investigation. James Cattell had published a ranking of the 1,000 prime movers of history by measuring the lengths of their entries in biographical dictionaries. Catherine Cox, Terman's associate, whittled the list to 282, assembled detailed biographical information about their early life, and proceeded to estimate two IQ values for each—one, called Al IQ [age range one IQ], for birth to seventeen years; the other, A2 IQ [age range two IQ], for ages seventeen to twenty-six.

Cox ran into problems right at the start. She asked five people, including Terman [Maud Merrill, Florence Goodenaugh, and Kate Gordon], to read her dossiers and to estimate the two IQ scores for each person. Three of the five agreed substantially in their mean values, with Al IQ clustering around 135 and A2 IQ near 145. But two of the raters differed markedly, one awarding an average IQ well above, the other well below, the common figure. Cox simply eliminated their scores, thereby throwing out 40 percent of her data. Their low and high scores would have balanced each other at the mean in any case, she argued (1926, p. 72). Yet if five people working in the same research group could not agree, what hope for uniformity or consistency—not to mention objectivity—could be offered?

Apart from these debilitating practical difficulties, the basic logic of the study was hopelessly flawed from the first. The differences in IQ that Cox recorded among her subjects do not measure their varying accomplishments, not to mention their native intelligence. Instead, the differences are a methodological artifact of the varying quality of information that Cox was able to compile about the childhood and early youth of her subjects. Cox began by assigning a base IQ of 100 to each individual; the raters then added to (or, rarely, subtracted from) this value according to the data provided.

Cox's dossiers are motley lists of childhood and youthful accomplishments, with an emphasis on examples of precocity. Since her method involved adding to the base figure of 100 for each notable item in the dossier, estimated IQ records little more than the volume of available information. In general, low IQ's reflect an absence of information, and high IQ's an extensive list. (Cox even admits that she is not measuring true IQ, but only what can be deduced from limited data, though this disclaimer was invariably lost in translation to popular accounts.) To believe, even for a moment, that such a procedure can recover the proper ordering of IQ among "men of genius," one must assume that the childhood of all subjects was watched and recorded with roughly equal attention. One must claim (as Cox does) that an absence of documented childhood precocity indicates a humdrum life not worth writing about, not an extraordinary giftedness that no one bothered to record.

Two basic results of Cox's study immediately arouse our strong suspicion that her IQ scores reflect the historical accidents of surviving records, rather than the true accomplishments of her geniuses. First, IQ is not supposed to alter in a definite direction during a person's life. Yet average Al IQ is 135 in her study, and average A2 IQ is a substantially higher 145. When we scrutinize her dossiers (printed in full in Cox, 1926), the reason is readily apparent, and a clear artifact of her method. She has more information on her subjects as young adults than as children (A2 IQ records achievements during ages seventeen through twenty-six; Al IQ marks the earlier years). Second, Cox published disturbingly low Al IQ figures for some formidable characters, including Cervantes and Copernicus, both at 105. Her dossiers show the reason: little or nothing is known about their childhood, providing no data for addition to the base figure of 100. Cox established seven levels of reliability for her figures. The seventh, believe it or not, is "guess, based on no data."

As a further and obvious test, consider geniuses born into humble circumstances, where tutors and scribes did not abound to encourage and then to record daring feats of precocity. John Mill may have learned Greek in his cradle, but did Faraday or Bunyan ever get the chance? Poor children are at a double disadvantage; not only did no one bother to record their early years, but they are also demoted as a direct result of their poverty. For Cox, using the favorite ploy of eugenicists, inferred innate parental intelligence from their occupations and social standing! She ranked parents on a scale of professions from 1 to 5, awarding their children an IQ of 100 for parental rank 3, and a bonus (or deficit) of 10 IQ points for each step above or below. A child who did nothing worth noting for the first seventeen years of his life could still score an IQ of 120 by virtue of his parent's wealth or professional standing.

Consider the case of poor Massena, Napoleon's great general, who bottomed out at 100 Al IQ and about whom, as a child, we know nothing except that he served as a cabin boy for two long voyages on his uncle's ship. Cox writes (p. 88): Nephews of battleship commanders probably rate somewhat above 100 IQ; but cabin boys who remain cabin boys for two long voyages and of whom there is nothing more to report until the age of 17 than their service as cabin boys, may average below 100 IQ.

Other admirable subjects with impoverished parents and meager records should have suffered the ignominy of scores below 100. But Cox managed to fudge and temporize, pushing them all above the triple-digit divide, if only slightly. Consider the unfortunate Saint-Cyr, saved only by remote kin, and granted an Al IQ of 105: "The father was a tanner after having been a butcher, which would give his son an occupational IQ status of 90 to 100; but two distant relatives achieved signal martial honors, thus indicating a higher strain in the family" (pp. 90-91). John Bunyan faced more familial obstacles than his famous Pilgrim, but Cox managed to extract a score of 105 for him:

Bunyan's father was a brazier or tinker, but a tinker of recognized position in the village; and the mother was not of the squalid poor, but of people who were "decent and worthy in their ways." This would be sufficient evidence for a rating between 90 and 100. But the record goes further, and we read that notwithstanding their "meanness and inconsiderableness," Bunyan's parents put their boy to school to learn "both to read and write," which probably indicates that he showed something more than the promise of a future tinker (p. 90).

Michael Faraday squeaked by at 105, overcoming the demerit of parental standing with snippets about his reliability as an errand boy and his questioning nature. His elevated A2 IQ of 150 only records increasing information about his more notable young manhood. In one case, however, Cox couldn't bear to record the unpleasant result that her methods dictated. Shakespeare, of humble origin and unknown childhood, would have scored below 100. So Cox simply left him out, even though she included several others with equally inadequate childhood records.

Among other curiosities of scoring that reflect Cox and Terman's social prejudices, several precocious youngsters (Clive, Liebig, and Swift, in particular) were downgraded for their rebelliousness in school, particularly for their unwillingness to study classics. An animus against the performing arts is evident in the rating of composers, who (as a group) rank just above soldiers at the bottom of the final list. Consider the following understatement about Mozart (p. 129): "A child who learns to play the piano at 3, who receives and benefits by musical instruction at that age, and who studies and executes the most difficult counterpoint at age 14, is probably above the average level of his social group."

In the end, I suspect that Cox recognized the shaky basis of her work, but persisted bravely nonetheless. Correlations between rank in eminence (length of Cattell's entry) and awarded IQ were disappointing to say the least—a mere 0.25 for eminence vs. A2 IQ, with no figure recorded at all for eminence vs. Al IQ (it is a lower 0.20 by my calculation). Instead, Cox makes much of the fact that her ten most eminent subjects average 4—yes only 4—Al IQ points above her ten least eminent.

Cox calculated her strongest correlation (0.77) between A2 IQ and "index of reliability," a measure of available information about her subjects. I can imagine no better demonstration that Cox's IQ's are artifacts of differential amounts of data, not measures of innate ability or even, for that matter, of simple talent. Cox recognized this and, in a final effort, tried to "correct" her scores for missing information by adjusting poorly documented subjects upward toward the group means of 135 for Al IQ and 145 for A2 IQ. These adjustments boosted average IQ's substantially, but led to other embarrassments. For uncorrected scores, the most eminent fifty averaged 142 for Al IQ, while the least eminent fifty scored comfortably lower at 133. With corrections, the first fifty scored 160, the last fifty, 165. Ultimately, only Goethe and Voltaire scored near the top both in IQ and eminence. One might paraphrase Voltaire's famous quip about god and conclude that even though adequate information on the IQ of history's eminent men does not exist, it was probably inevitable that the American hereditarians would try to invent it.”

Francis Galton (IQ:165|#266)
William Shakespeare (IQ:190|#48)
Marie Curie (IQ:185|#65)
Albert Einstein (IQ:215|#3)
George Shaw (IQ:165|#261)
William Yeats (IQ:170|#252)
Jean Champollion (IQ:175|#180)
Carl Gauss (IQ:190|#25)
Robert Hooke (IQ:195|#22)
August Kekule
Charles Lyell
James Maxwell (IQ:210|#4)
Dmitri Mendeleyev (IQ:175|#182)
Louis Pasteur (IQ:175|#92)
Christopher Wren
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Johannes Brahms
Paul Cezanne (IQ:150|#422)
Anton Chekhov
Francisco de Goya
Franz Schubert
Percy Shelley (IQ:185|#80)
Leo Tolstoy (IQ:180|#96)
Oscar Wild