High Wis Low Int character?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

For what it's worth, I wound up pegging IQ7 the minimum needed to have something recognizable as "civilization." Cats and Dogs are, i believe, IQ4-5. You can have particularly talented animals at IQ6. So I'm with you both that IQ7-8 is good PC "don't do less than this" point.

In the Basic Set, mammals generally have IQ 3 or 4, with dogs and cats being at 4. Apes have IQ 6. The only animal explicitly shown as having IQ 5 is the wild boar, but I would guess that monkeys go there also. We're told that realistically animal IQ is fixed, but that you can allow +1 at GM discretion.

My personal rule of thumb (not official in any way) is that species IQ varies with the square root of the ratio of brain volume to body surface area. Humans have about 8x the mammal average and typical IQ 10; apes about 4x and typical IQ 7; monkeys around 2x and typical IQ (at a guess) 5; that puts typical mammals at IQ 3.5, or 3-4. Smart birds (passerines, and probably parrots) are comparable to monkeys, which puts them at IQ 5; typical birds are about half mammal mass, which would be around IQ 2.5, or 2-3. Of course all of this may have been updated in recent years.

And IQ 1 pretty much represents any animal with any sort of awareness of its environment, however tiny its brain is.

So yes, I'd say that IQ 6 is over the edge of sapience, but probably not enough for anything comparable to human culture.