(Off Topic) Intelligent People Have "Unnatural" Preferences and Values That Are Novel in Human Ev...

[OKIsItJustMe]

(Arguably) it's off-topic, but somehow...

http://www.asanet.org/press/20100223/Evolution_and_Intelligence.cfm

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Intelligent People Have "Unnatural" Preferences and Values That Are Novel in Human Evolutionary History

Higher intelligence is associated with liberal political ideology, atheism, and men's (but not women's) preference for sexual exclusivity

More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles."

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists."

Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women's value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa's analysis of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well.

One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.

The article "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent" will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, a publication of the American Sociological Association. A copy can be obtained by bona fide journalists by emailing a request to [e-mail].

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About the American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society.

[MineralMan]

1. Hmm...post hoc ergo propter hoc, anyone?

Sociology is not a science, IMO. I don't think it ever will be.

Lots of bad work out there by sociologists.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. You may appreciate Tom Lehrer's take on Sociology

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI

[MineralMan]

5. Great! I love Tom Lehrer.

[On the Road]

2. I Have Never Been More Proud

to call myself unnatural.

[DesertFlower]

4. me too. nt

[GliderGuider]

6. Bummer. My preference for polyamoury just cost me 10 IQ points.

I'm lucky that's not the brain that does my thinking.

:evilgrin:

[joshcryer]

7. Hah, you're one of many anti-civ types I've known who've said their preference for that.

Wonder what's up with that.

[GliderGuider]

8. We're more in touch with our true nature

:evilgrin:

[XemaSab]

9. This doesn't make sense

Conservative people are more likely to be playas, but they are more likely to have a rigid morality and to be devoted to hearth and home?

:shrug:

[depakid]

10. Satoshi Kanazawa- that's the nutter who wrote about nuking Muslims!

...It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” (As I explain elsewhere, we are not really fighting terrorists.) We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t.

This has never been the case in our previous wars. We have always hated our enemies purely and intensely. They were “Japs,” they were “Krauts,” they were “Gooks.” And we didn’t think twice about dropping bombs on them, to kill them and their wives and children. (As many commentators have pointed out, the distinction between combatants and civilians does not make sense in World War III, and the Geneva Convention -- an agreement among nations -- is no longer applicable, because our enemies are not nation states.) Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running. <referring to Hillary Clinton>

More: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200803/why-we-are-losing-war

[GliderGuider]

11. My non-flip comment is that this piece of "science" is utterly useless.

The belief in gods seems to have been a constant feature of the human experience, but to posit a link to genetic evolution seems a bit of a stretch to me. A simpler explanation would be something like this: as we became aware of the universe around us and intellectually capable of asking “Why” and solving problems through deductive reasoning, the idea of “god” emerged as a placeholder explanation in cases where the cause of random events was unknown.

The tendencies towards monogamy, polyandry and polygyny vary all over the map through history and around the world. In order to say that any particular tendency is genetic rather than cultural you would need either a control group or a very large sample through both space and time. We can’t probe back in time on this issue more than about 10,000 years before the record becomes too ambiguous to be useful. Again, it seems more useful IMO to look at cultural influences than evolutionary ones.

The term “liberalism” is so politically and semantically loaded that it is useless as a marker in purportedly scientific research.

In short, this “research” reeks of cultural bias, and is useless except to provide another citation in the author's publication list.