Who is Cleverer?

Anywhere we see today IQ is widely publicized as the definitive measure of human intelligence. The society has also bought into this idea as a common sense that a person who has a higher IQ score is clever than the other with a lower IQ. Is it that straight forward to measure human intelligence ?Or is human intelligence something that narrow a concept that it can be measured with such ease? I definitely don't think so.

During a casual discussion with a friend of mine some time back,we came to a topic where I felt that it was quite obvious that people like scientists are cleverer than me,and it did seem like an obvious statement.I was surprised when he begged to differ and that he was in no way less than the scientist. Initially I thought this guy is just crazy or does not understand what he was implying, how can just another person like me or him be clever than a scientist,who can put a man in space! The justification he provided was so simple yet so profound. His justification was that the scientist may be better than us in that field of study, but considering the day to day walk of life,like how to deal with other people, caring for your loved ones or even just a task of how to approach a girl grab her attention and asking out :), the scientist may not be able to match his abilities. These seemingly simple day to day things are very crucial for any human given we are a social being, and these are the walk of life where people make most mistake in and struggle in life. So who is cleverer then? The scientist who can put a human in space but does not have the social skill to even manage his own family or a person who is adept in handling human interactions and hence is socially successful.

After that day as I began to think of it more,it dawned onto me yet more vividly how true his statement was. One thing which is directly clear from the above scenario is human intelligence cannot be narrowly defined and compared between two individuals. Any comparison between two individuals can only be in terms of comparing as to who is better in a particular task.
The other more profound implication of this which is not so straight forward is that all humans are equally endowed in some way or the other, and that there is no one superior or inferior to another. Trying to justify to myself on how the latter implication is correct,I came across this line of thought. Consider human mind as a processing unit which has this unparalleled ability to perform any task when trained appropriately. It can be a creative poet who can play with language creating everlasting impression in the reader,a musician who can conjure up amazing music, a philosopher like Gautama Buddha who preached people how to live life, a leader who leads a country, a doctor who saves life, a scientist, a teacher, an engineer and the list really is endless. And its not just these,a person is able to perform many combination of such tasks,like an engineer who is also a musician and so on. Also tasks like social interaction, ability to talk, write, knowing multiple languages,planning and leading a happy life,every single task we do every day without even being aware of it needs some processing power.

Its my opinion that given all these tasks which the human brain performs,for any person the over all processing potential is the same, its only that the distribution across various task is different. So probably an expert musician has by practice dedicated more processing towards music than another person who invested it for something else.

Another more abstract higher philosophical explanation for this could be that the human mind is endless and unlimited in its true potential (Buddhist philosophy).
In which case all human minds have the same potential and hence all are equal. This though more appropriate is by far more complex to realize and so I stick with the first approach :).

This line of thought and a realization of sorts that no one is cleverer than another, has had profound impact on me personally.
On one hand I feel more comfortable and confident being myself in that I am no less than any one else.On the other has cut down my ego, which a friend of mine says is huge :).