"There are approximately 2,000,000 children in the United States with IQ's of 140* or more. Persons in that range (which would include most Quiz Kids) constitute, according to some estimates, one percent of the population: a potential genius for every hundred people walking the streets! Even Terman began to back off from such blanket characterizations when faced with the fact that not all his subjects had enjoyed brillant careers. (interestingly, on the other side of the coin, Nobel prizewinners William Shockley and Luis Alvarez reportedly did not qualify for the Terman sample.)
    "Lou Cowan, originator of the "Quiz Kids," understood as some of our public did not) that I. Q. alone does not a genius make, and that a child who can read at three, identify hundreds of birds, or memorize a long list of Biblical "begats" is not , ipso facto, a prodigy.  True prodigies are rare, and are not, generally speaking, found on quiz shows. They are too busy pursuing the intensive training they need in order to advance in their fields---usually self-contained fields like music or math, which can be mastered rapidly without consummate life experience.
    "'Quiz Kids' did number some musical prodigies among its roster, including Lonny Lunde and Joan Bishop. For numerical virtuosity, we might nominate Joel Kupperman and Richard Williams. But Joan and Lon chose not to pursue concert piano careers, and neither Joel nor Dick cared to devote himself to higher mathematics.
    "As Professor David Feldman of Tufts University points out, interest and tenacious commitment are keys to a prodigy's progress. Further, it is not uncommon for a musical prodigy to peak early and drop from notice, nor for a math prodigy to end up in a different field--few, as they move along, show the inclination or capacity for deep mathematical analysis. And prodigious capability rarely transfers from one field to another."

* - Best estimates point toward a frequency of occurence of ratio IQ's of 140 and above of 1-in-80. Of course, there wouldn't have been 2,000,000 children with IQ's of 140 or above in 1982, but there might have been something like 2,000,000 people in toto. Today, we would expect in excess of 3,000,000.

Ms. Feldman continues:
    "Darwin was no child wonder. He was uninterested in his studies and made false starts on two different careers before joining the voage of the Beagle at twenty-one as a junior naturalist. As his autobiography revelas, he considered his abilities only moderate. He was not, he claimed, quick or clever; he had difficulty following an abstract train of thought; and his memory was so poor that he could not recall a date of a line of poetry for more than a few days(!) Certainly not Quiz Kid material!
    "What he did have was a love of science, 'inbounding patience,' industriousness, and 'a fair share invention as well as common sense." Above all, an open mind and 'the strongest desire to understand or explain' what he observed. Like other great thinkers, he had what has been called a 'divine discontent; urging him on...a combination of inspiration and self-discipline."
    "Fundamental to success is the ability to focus on and pursue a goal, as Harve did. Being well-rounded, as Quiz Kids were supposed to be, some of us have found it difficult to do that. Jack Lucal calls jhimself an 'intellectual wanderer.' Joan Bishop is 'honeycombed.' I never went to graduate scool because I could not commit myself to a particular field."

    "In a Darwinian sense, the fittest were those of us whose talents were particularly adapted to success in the Quiz Kid environment; and those abilities, in turn, were sharpened in the process. That we were not necessarily fittest to be opera stars or Nobel prizewinners, Presidents or Popes, should disappoint only the naive.
    "Yet some of us have a nagging feeling that we should have done more."

    "I, for one, found it difficult, after my childhood laurels and my parents' lavish praise, to accept life's inevitable disappointments and my own parental shortcomings. While my early success left me (as it did some of my Quiz Kid colleagues) with the buoying but rather irrational feeling that I can do anything, at the same time I felt inadequate to meet that impossible expectation. One reason is that the more deeply I went into something, the more distant horizons I could glimpse. In college, I would come out of each examination worried about how I had done--to my classmates' disbelief, since I rarely fell below an A."