The current interest in individuals' intellectual abilities was born when a new bourgeois class began to challenge the society into which it was born. When it was no longer ancestry and position that dictated how far one could go in life, without the individual's own talent, it became more important how this looked. The image of a new, quick-witted, middle class against a sluggish old aristocracy became so popular that it soon became a cliché. It is the one we were amused by when reading PG Woodhouse’s stories of how the brilliant Jeeves always had to help Bertie Wooster and his upper-class fool friends. The actual explosion was not until the late 1800s, when Darwin's theory of evolution and statistical science gave scientists the tools to speculate. Darwin believed that intelligence was not uniquely human. If you do not have the ability to learn from experience - how to find food, where danger exists - so one cannot survive and spread this inabil...