Astro
Your proposed range of IQ is a lot broader than you think. People with Downs Syndrome have obtained college degrees. Some are unable to speak or walk, and most function at some level between the two. In the next thirty years you will begin to meet people who have Downs Syndrome and are not retarded, or even particularly handicapped, since many are now receiving therapies which prevent the damage so common in the syndrome.
But, you have undoubtedly met many people who are legally retarded and you never noticed. They might not have said much, or spoken to you at all. Retarded people who function well enough to engage the general public often are generally fairly shy, and often go out of their way to avoid being identified by their handicaps. But I assure you I know many people who are retarded, and are quite normal, even attractive in appearance. Some even speak in with the confidence and articulation that are common in ordinary people. A few are great conversationalists, and some are able to bring their perspective to your conversation. (Admittedly, in most cases only one or two of these aspects will be true for one retarded person.)
I know a very beautiful woman who is mildly retarded. She is astoundingly facile in brushing off the attention of men who hit on her. She learned it over many years. But she is retarded, and does need support to function in our complicated society. And she understands how much her limits matter to other people. It took a very long time for her to unlearn the lesson that she could never let a man become close to her. And then, it hurt a lot to find out that she is not good at picking out the men who really don’t care about her intellect, and do care about her self.
A man I know, also retarded, works in an office in the Federal Government, and only his direct supervisor and a very few people in his office know he is mentally retarded. He was trained very carefully, and he knows and does his job with very little supervision. (He collects and shreds classified documents, for which he is very highly qualified, since he cannot read, and had to learn to identify the classification stamps by visual cues.) Most of the people he works with think he is just a real quite guy. He says hello, and how are you, and other conversational trivia, and if a coworker asks about his personal life, he gives them minor trivia, just like you and I. He learned his from a job coach who knew that those skills were important in maintaining a public position. He really can’t hold a lengthy conversation, and if you do try to elicit one from him at work, he will say, “I wish I could talk, but I have to get back to work. Bye.”
Actually, something the opposite of what you are talking about happens to me a lot. I see people in normal places, doing normal things, and I recognize that they suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, or some other syndrome that is often associated with mental retardation. Some of them are probably mentally affected by it, too. But they are not retarded, legally. I can sometimes tell if someone has been on Dilantin, Haldol, or Thorazine for a long time, just by looking at them. Other things are readily evident to me, because I have seen them so very many times. It doesn’t mean that they are retarded, only that they have these syndromes which are often associated with retardation.
But the range of IQ we call normal is very broad indeed. Most of the very bright and successful people you know are normal in intelligence, and those idiots you yell at in traffic are normal too. By definition, most of us are normal, and by consequence, most of the very low functioning people are never anywhere where you will meet them. The very smartest have their own set of segregational forces.
That’s the thing about normal. It’s so damn common.
Tris