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I would imagine most freepers are on the upper side of the bell curve. The addiction to constant and up to date information is actually an indicator of people who are not getting enough to process in their normal day to day activities. The stupidest freeper would very likely be around 110. Some of them, I am confident, are in the upper 170 range.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I'm afraid your logic is flawed. IQ measures your "innate" intelligence, not general (or specific) knoweldge. Free Republic draws from the same population that everything else is drawn from, so by and large, you're going to have people in lower range of the bell curve, you'll have some on the upper range of the curve, but the bulk of your Free Republic population is still going to be in that 90-110 range.

If you were to give a test on current events, then I'd agree with you that the population of Free Republic would likely score higher than the population in general.

For any "generic" population to have an above average number of people with IQ's over 170 would be a statistical anomoly. (170 is pretty damn smart...I'd be surprised if Free Republic had 2 people with IQ's of 160 or higher.) As an example here are some famous people and their listed IQs.

IQ 160

Bill Gates (CEO, Microsoft)
Jill St. John (Actress)
Paul Allen (160+, Microsoft cofounder)
Stephen W. Hawking (160+) (Physicist)

IQ 170

Andrew J. Wiles (Mathematician; solved Fermat's Last Theorem)
Judith Polgar (Formula based; Female World Champion in Chess)

IQ 180

James Woods (Actor)
John H. Sununu (Chief of Staff for President Bush)
Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister)
Marilyn Vos Savant (186) (Author)
Bobby Fischer (187) (Former World Champion in Chess)

IQ 190

Philip Emeagwali (Extrapolated; Nigerian Mathematician)

IQ 200
Kim Ung-Yong (S. Korea; Showed similar child capabilities as J.S. Mill)

I'd bet FR has a few dozen 160+ IQs. For one thing, it should be fairly obvious for a number of reasons that the intellectual profile of a typical FR reader is *not* the same as the general population. I'm not saying conservatives are inherently smarter- I also don't believe websites for science , chess, classical music, or theater would have a "typical" intellectual profile either. I would expect, however, that they would draw disproportionately from the high side of the curve, and less from the low side.

Doesn't seem like an unreasonable leap to me...