An anonymous reader pointed out that I stated somewhere in DbF (Chapter 12, maybe) that an IQ of 150 is half again as large as the average while it is more accurate to state that less than 1% of people have an IQ that high.
Of course, I agree. The IQ range can be described by a bell-shaped curve where 100 is (maybe) directly in the middle at the top, with the largest % of people residing at that top point. As one moves in either direction away from center, the curve descends and the % of people a point on the line represents is increasingly small.
An IQ of 150 is at the far end of the bell-shaped curve and therefore is represented by very few people, indeed.
Actually, the idea for this story was generated by two things: I read Methuselah's Children as a young kid and my objection even as a 10 year old was: why select for age when you could select for intelligence?
As my son reached school age, we realized he was quite different from the average kid. His first grade teacher thought he was slow and unintelligent and should be held back. I was more than skeptical and insisted that he be tested by the school psychologist
Turns out he has an IQ of 148. A week later I had pulled my kid out of the school.
I came to the opinion that as animals have higher and higher thought processes and become more intelligent, the longer the time needed for maturation.
I guess I then speculated that by increasing the length of childhood, we were on the verge of evolving into something different.
The juxtaposition of these separate things led to the plot for Death By Fucking.
I know: tmi. Sorry