Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9504080001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFFREY KLUGER NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
As far as Simonton is concerned, Adams, Adams, Madison and Jefferson are among the few truly great presidents the United States has ever elected.
Compared with them, everyone else is Millard Fillmore.
Simonton knows what he's talking about. For the better part of the last three decades, the psychologist at the University of California at Davis has been studying the concept of greatness, trying to determine what it is, how it's pursued and just who is likeliest to achieve it.
He's recently published what he's learned in the book ``Greatness: Who Makes History and Why'' (Guilford Press, 1994), in which he explains for the first time the precise characteristics that lead to history-making success in every field, from politics to science to art to sports to popular music.
Simonton doesn't claim to fathom everything that separates the Charlemagnes from the charlatans, the Pretenders from the pretenders. He does, however, understand much of it.
``Greatness is a complicated thing,'' Simonton says. ``Most ambitious people have aspired to it at one time or another, but the vast majority of us never achieve it.''
The first step in studying greatness, Simonton explains, is determining just what it is. And the first step in determining what it is, is understanding that greatness is more than mere fame.
As even a casual reading of history reveals, it's possible to be a household name and still not be welcome in most households. There's Joseph McCarthy and Benedict Arnold, Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan.
``People acquire fame or infamy any time they have an impact on society,'' Simonton explains. ``But the people who earn the designation of greatness are the ones who make a contribution that only they could make.''
But what is it that determines which of us will become great?
To answer this question, Simonton amassed a data base of high-profile figures in two dozen fields to determine what, if anything, they all had in common.
Over the years, he's profiled more than 35,000 achievers, including 2,026 scientists; 2,012 philosophers; 479 musicians; 342 kings, queens and sultans; 696 composers; 420 writers; and, of course, 39 U.S. presidents. (George Bush and Bill Clinton, the 41st and 42nd presidents, came along too late.)
Eligibility for Simonton's survey varied according to field.
For composers, for example, he looked at how frequently an individual's work is performed publicly. For scientists, he looked at frequency of publication and citation.
As he suspected, when his research was done, it turned out that most people in his data base had a remarkable amount in common.
``The biggest indicator of whether someone is going to attain greatness is the age at which he or she begins to show interest and aptitude in a particular field,'' Simonton says.
Bobby Fischer learned the rudiments of chess when he was 6, which is quite young. Mozart composed his first keyboard pieces when he was 5.
Once people destined for greatness begin to produce, they tend to keep producing.
``Truly great people are very prolific very quickly,'' Simonton says. ``Starting young, they usually reach a peak of productivity in their late 30s or early 40s. After middle age some burn out, but others keep producing right up to their death.''
There are achievers, however, who generally defy the overall rules on greatness and age, and these are the scientists.
In fields such as geology, biology and medicine, the true breakthroughs belong to researchers in late middle age or beyond.
Charles Darwin had evolved into his 50s before completing the ``Origin Of Species.''
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was an even later bloomer, writing his imaginative - if later partially discredited - ``Natural History of Invertebrates'' between the ages of 71 and 78.
In abstract specialties such as math and physics, things happen a lot faster, with most landmark accomplishments occurring well before the middle-age peak.
Isaac Newton had his enormously productive ``annus mirabilis'' (Loose translation: ``my favorite year'') at the just-post-college age of 24 without having to spend so much as a single summer working men's wear at The Gap.
English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac shared a Nobel Prize in 1933 when he was only 31.
However, the different speed at which greatness is achieved in different fields has little to do with skill. Rather, Simonton believes, it is mostly a result of the different ways knowledge is acquired from specialty to specialty.
Biologists must master centuries' worth of pre-existing wisdom before having any hope of synthesizing it into something new.
Mathematicians and physicists, by contrast, need master only a limited number of physical or arithmetical essentials. Anything they accomplish after that is largely a result of inspiration and interpretation.
But what causes these high achievers to start achieving in the first place? Is it IQ that initially sets the great apart? Inherited talent? A great contact at William Morris?
Simonton says the answer to the first two questions is a qualified yes.
It was French psychologist Alfred Binet who came up with the idea of calculating intelligence by dividing mental age - as measured by performance on a standardized test - by chronological age and coming up with a single figure representing a person's IQ.
By definition, an IQ of 1 would be average, an IQ of greater than 1 would be above average, and an IQ below 1 would indicate a promising future in professional wrestling.
Anyone scoring above 1.4 would be considered a genius.
Eventually all these figures were multiplied by 100 in order to avoid the use of confusing decimals.
In recent decades the IQ test has become the object of some controversy, as critics have claimed that its questions are often culturally biased, favoring people from white upper- or middle-class backgrounds.
Nevertheless, for the better part of this century the IQ score has been the closest thing we have to an empirical measure of intelligence.
In the 1920s Catherine Cox, a Stanford graduate student, developed a method of measuring the intelligence of long-dead achievers by assessing their academic, artistic and other accomplishments from childhood on.
Comparing these achievements with those of other people in their age group, she was able to come up with a rough measure of their IQ.
Since then, Simonton and others have used similar techniques to determine the probable intelligence of a variety of achievers, and the results of the studies have been illuminating.
Of the hundreds of achievers whose scores were calculated, 19th-century British economist John Stuart Mill finished first, tipping the scales with an IQ of 190.
Composers Handel, Mozart and Mendelssohn were not far behind, weighing in at 160.
But fame and brains do not necessarily go hand in hand - and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of politics.
Simonton has discovered that in order to succeed at the ballot box, political figures have to come across as just intelligent enough to win the respect of their constituency, but not so intelligent that they seem aloof or incomprehensible.
As the electorate grows smarter, the leaders it chooses do, too. In the United States at least, the numbers bear him out. Thomas Jefferson, who with an inferred IQ of 160 was the second smartest of all presidents (John Quincy Adams was first, at 170), barely squeezed by Aaron Burr in the election of 1800.
Adlai Stevenson, arguably the smartest candidate never to reach the White House, was twice trounced by the comparatively low-watt Eisenhower.
Ronald Reagan, an extremely lifelike inflatable president, defeated Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in successive landslides in 1980 and 1984.
``When you survey the inferred IQs of the men who have been president, you begin to approach that of the general population,'' Simonton says. ``The optimum IQ for American leaders appears to be about 119.''
IQ, of course, is not all there is to achieving greatness. just as important can be inborn aptitude.
As a study of achievers in countless fields will tell you, highly successful people often appear to pass on their knack for achieving to their linear and even non-linear descendants.
There was Judy Garland and daughter Liza Minnelli; Teddy Roosevelt and cousin Franklin Roosevelt.
Do genes alone account for such dynasties, or is all this inherited achievement just the greatness equivalent of the boss getting his nephew a job in the family business?
Simonton believes it's a little of both.
But if genes were entirely responsible, families with one great member would all be great, and this is clearly not the case.
For example, Frank Sinatra's legacy to the world is not another generation of successful crooners with incredibly bad haircuts, but daughter and noted boot promoter Nancy.
``Just as important as genetics is a person's willingness to learn from the previous generation,'' Simonton explains. ``If you inherit talent, you still have to do what it takes to maximize what nature has given you.''
If a person with the potential for greatness indeed sets off on the path toward achievement, there is by no means a guarantee of success. A price must be paid for greatness - and sometimes it's high.
Typically, people who achieve greatness suffer a disproportionately high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as depression and other emotional disorders.
``In order to be creative, it seems you have to be slightly crazy,'' Simonton says,
Despite these drawbacks, it's hard to imagine a world without its most remarkable people. And although those that are living may make outrageous amounts of money and spend way too much time in Aspen, Simonton points out that their lives are different from yours and mine because they themselves are different from you and me.
In a way that's good. After all, would you want Barbara Walters to have your home phone number?
Jeffrey Kluger, a contributing editor to Discover magazine, is co-author with James Lovell of ``Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13'' (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
by CNB