Is debating intelligence worthwhile?

Today in the Chronicle for Higher Education, a behavioral scientist decides to take up the perennially popular debate over whether there is only one type of genius. The article is a response to a current questioning of genius and the idea of one intelligence by people like Robert J. Sternberg and Malcolm Gladwell. The author of this most recent article, Christopher J. Ferguson, is not buying it. According to him, there is no street smarts that is equal in worth to book smarts. In fact, he says, someone with book smarts has more street smarts than someone without it:

Aren’t there plenty of Ph.D.’s who can’t fix their cars? Sure, but the majority of them could learn if they were so inclined. An individual with low “g” is going to struggle at both book learning and auto repair (although perhaps car mechanics would prove more manageable than literary theory or quantum physics).

Forget that I do not agree with Ferguson based on my own life experiences, I have to wonder what the point of having this debate is. Why are Ferguson and others in his camp so intent on proving that there is only one intelligence? My sense is that he craves a certainty that might allow him to see the world in an intellecutal hierarchy, but that is just a guess.

If he wants to bring this debate toward reality, I think Ferguson ought to look at why people succeed. If he did, I think he would find that there are  intelligences that do not all come in the same package. Successful people can be sociable, persistent, logical, or creative, or a combination of some of those things–usually with persistence as the common thread–but they may lack the others. We’re all familiar with the story of the antisocial nerd who founds a successful tech company or the politician who was not hindered by mediocre academic performance because of outsized social skills. Those people possess different intelligences, but they’re successful. Isn’t figuring out how to harness one’s abilities–whatever they are–an intelligence in itself greater than letting the kind of genius about which Ferguson writes wither to inertia?