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The Prometheus Society has a great article, The Outsiders, on two important studies of IQ, one by Lewis M. Terman, who provided the "Stanford" half of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, and the other by Leta S. Hollingworth, whose book on her findings is Children Above 180 IQ. Both studies were longitudinal and long-term, drawn from very large pools of subjects.
 
Conclusion? The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be maladjusted.

Point taken. But to most people I think it sounds like we are arguing semantics. Like many brilliant people his thinking is purely logical and many people often are not they are irrational. I think he is right. But being right isn't always practical. It is one of the hardest things for intelligent people to learn to suffer fools gladly.
Hollingworth notes: A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered. Failure to learn how to tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness, disillusionment, and misanthropy [3, p. 259].

William Sidis

Of all the prodigies for which there are records, his was probably the most powerful intellect of all. And yet it all came to nothing. He soon gave up his position as a professor, and for the rest of his life wandered from one menial job to another. His experiences as a child prodigy had proven so painful that he decided for the rest of his life to shun public exposure at all costs. Henceforth, he denied his gifts, refused to think about mathematics, and above all refused to perform as he had been made to do as a child. Instead, he devoted his intellect almost exclusively to the collection of streetcar transfers, and to the study of the history of his native Boston.

This article about gifted children was published on the Prometheus Society website. I'm not a member of that society, but another one with a high level of exclusivity (much higher than Mensa). It's as much a support group as it is anything else, because children with this "gift" are often brought up in ways that are quite harmful to them. I certainly was not the prodigy that this child was, or that William Sidis was, so I can't say that I know what it's like to be a child like that, but from everything that I can tell in this group, putting a child into college at age 8 is wrong in every way. My childhood was bad enough, I can't imagine how awful it will be for this little boy.

Hmmm... sounds like someone got rejected.

Seriously, though, I joined Mensa just so I could say Mensa is for losers and not sound like I was shouting sour grapes.

Of course, now that I'm in, there are always greater heights to achieve.

These groups include:

• The MegaGuild (IQ 180+)
  
• The MegaBoard (IQ 164+)
  
• The Ultranet (IQ 164+)
  
• The Prometheus Society (IQ 164+)
  
• The Triple Nine Society (IQ 150+)
  
• Mensa (IQ 132+)
  

There is an article , The Outsiders, that explores the social adjustment of extremely intelligent people. I'm not sure that it will provide the answers you're seeking, but it gives some insight into the nature of the problem.

I was a bit curious as to the reason why there seems to be no speculation about this "giant ape" being a chimpanzee/human hybrid. Of course, humans have a different number of chromosomes than the other great apes, but that in itself doesn't seem to be an absolute bar to cross-breeding. The answer seems to be in this article, where it basically says that human DNA has a number of chromosomal "inversions" with respect to chimpanzee DNA, and those inversions would lead to cross-breeding sterility.

For me, being on line is almost exclusively a social activity. I post to Slashdot, Usenet and several mailing lists. I am carrying on a correspondence with lots of people. In fact, I suspect that a subtle part of the appeal of the Free Software community is the desire to talk to people like ourselves. We aren't all socially inept just because we're nerds. We're intense and passionate about our interests, and they don't happen to be the same as those of the guys watching the game at the sports bar down the street.

I've talked about this before. The Net has made possible communities without location. Slashdot is an excellent example of that. We have quite a range of personalities here. We have a few shared interests about which our interest ranges from serious to passionate. But we speak the same language. I dug up an article,The Outsiders, last year about the difficulties that highly intelligent people ave socially. It debunks the theory that it is due primarily to social ineptitude. Instead, the author theorizes, with studies to back him up, that the problem is one of gradual alienation because of differing rates of development in childhood and different interests.

I have thought for years that most self-selecting non-mainstream interests tend to attract groups with an average intelligence higher than that of society as a whole. I emphatically do not mean that any given member of such a group is exceptional by association. But there are two reasons corresponding to the low and high ends of the spectrum. At the low end, there is a question of ability and opportunity. The self-selection process tends to weed out the least able. At the high end, the article that I cited above points out that the highly intelligent tend to have many interests, often too many for the time that they can devote to them. Thus, through both ability, and desire, they are more likely to participat in many interests.

One important fact to consider is that most human characteristics that can be measured quantitatively fall on a bell curve statistically. There are fewer individuals at the high and low ends of the curve. If the article (The Outsiders) is correct and there is actually a communication gap between people of radically differing intelligence, then finding people to talk to requires a larger population for people at the extremes. The Net does exactly that. Not only are there a huge number of people easily accessible here, but it is easy to find communities for nearly any interest.

Far from being a lonely place, the Net is perhaps the medium of choice for forming communities out of widely scattered people with unusual interests.

Did the Geeks create the Net or the Net create the Geeks? There is no answer to this question. Each generation of geeks creates the foundation for those that follow. The Net has become a gathering place for many small and widely dispersed, self-selected groups because it makes possible community divorced from location. Large cities have often drawn minorities to them in the past. If you are a minority (linguistic, racial, religious, or otherwise), you stand a better chance of being able to get together with your fellows in a high concentration of people, even if they are no more common there.

If you draw the definition of geek broadly enough, then it fits any marginalized minority. True enough, it is frequently used almost that broadly. And oddly enough, I suspect there are some other odd commonalities among those of us who fit the definition of 20 years ago, bright, focused on intellectual interests to the exclusion of more common hobbies, socially awkward to some degree.
Many of us have never been called geeks by anyone who isn't actually a geek. As The Jargon File points out in A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, the typical hacker is a voracious reader on a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Reading that description, I saw more of myself in it than I saw in Katz's piece above. I knew when I read it that the person or people who wrote it understood.

Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.

This particular statement reminded me instantly of The Programmers' Stone. It describes the tension between what The Stone referred to as mappers and packers. One of the things that I regret about print media is that it must, of necessity, be more self-contained. Readers are less well served by references to other sources rather than led to further clarification. In this case, I believe that the discussion in The Stone about the effect of education on children's natural tendency towards mapping may shed more light on what geeks are than any single other source I have read recently. We are the ones who have not forgotten how to map, but who in many cases felt isolated because of that. Another article that examines this same issue from the perspective of intelligence and psychology is The Outsiders. If you've had a difficulty communicating with non-geeks, both of these articles are worth reading.