Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History

[Christa]

Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — 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."

Full article here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm

[saltpoint]

1. I definitely feel that dolphins are smarter than I am.

[stray cat]

2. You certainly would not guess it if so by looking at politicians

and what they can get accomplished

[M155Y_A1CH]

3. Their IQs are showing

What is the percentage of intelligent people in political office?
Educated liberal "elite" need not apply.
:shrug:

[GliderGuider]

4. I have real concerns about the validity of the assumptions in this piece of social "science"

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 authors' publication lists.

[bananas]

5. LOL - PZ Myers: "freakishly fact-free evolutionary psychology"

"And then look at the source: Satoshi Kanazawa, the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology, the professional fantasist of Psychology Today. He's like the poster boy for the stupidity and groundlessness of freakishly fact-free evolutionary psychology. Just ignore anything with Kanazawa's name on it."
:rofl:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_yourselves_on_the.php

Stop patting yourselves on the back over this study

Category: Stupidity
Posted on: February 25, 2010 10:40 AM, by PZ Myers

Good grief. This ridiculous study is making the rounds of the atheist community, with its claim that liberals and atheists are smarter than conservatives and religious people. Look at the numbers!

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.

Seriously? Show me the error bars on those measurements. Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence. Show me that a 6 point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real. And then to claim that these differences are not only heritable, but evolutionarily significant…jebus, people, you can just glance at it and see that it is complete crap.

And then look at the source: Satoshi Kanazawa, the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology, the professional fantasist of Psychology Today. He's like the poster boy for the stupidity and groundlessness of freakishly fact-free evolutionary psychology. Just ignore anything with Kanazawa's name on it.

Thanks to alp227 for the link: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7804487&mesg_id=7804538

[frogmarch]

6. What crap.

I'm an atheist, and I say it's crap. "Studies" such as this one are ridiculous.