

Intelligent people have 'unnatural' preferences and values - petercooper
http://www.rdmag.com/News/Feeds/2010/02/life-sciences-intelligent-people-have-unnatural-preferences-and-/

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hugh3
_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._

That's a rather unconventional definition of "conservative" and "liberal"
they're using there. One might almost suspect an agenda.

I'm also unclear on why things which are "evolutionarily novel" should be
correlated with higher intelligence.

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mixmax
Perhaps because one of the things that is evolutionary novel _is_
intelligence. It seems reasonable that there's a correlation between some or
all of these things, they're most probably interlinked somehow. For instance:
If you're highly intelligent this will impact how you live your life, which
decisions you make, etc. whic in turn could easily mean that you'll have
subtly different preferences and characteristics than a less intelligent
person.

~~~
whatwhatwhat
This article lost my respect at..

"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."

~~~
mixmax
May I ask why? I don't think it seems all that unreasonable.

~~~
hugh3
I assume he meant because the difference turns out to be small enough to be
barely significant. (And possibly completely in-.)

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axiom
Evolutionary psychology is a cesspool. Honestly it's as if 95% of the
researchers in the field have never even heard of the scientific method, or
things like "proof" and "evidence".

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BoppreH

      Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid,
      and they believe in God because they are paranoid
    

So, religion is natural? Although hard to detect, I don't think we have ever
perceived any kind of belief in God in any other creature. Including the apes,
that are quite similar to us considering the cited "millions of years"
timespan.

And +1 to "using I.Q. to measure intelligence."

~~~
derefr
Our nature is necessary, but not sufficient, for religion. Religion wasn't
invented by human hunter-gatherers; it only came around after the advent of
farming, when we began to think in long timescales (like harvests, or winters)
and had static resources (crops, houses) that had to be defended. Thus, we
invented prayer to try to change the far future (i.e. long-term weather
conditions—due to the large intervening period, it wasn't obvious whether it
worked or not in any given instance, so we assumed it did), and commandments
to justify our right to static resources, or our reasoning for pillaging them.
We also invented the afterlife to explain how our feeling of consciousness
would proceed into the far future, and gods to explain capricious phenomena
(like lightning, or floods) that our minds instinctively anthropomorphized.

Hunter-gatherers had their own "natural" superstitions, such as the belief
that opposing tribes and the unliked were capable of "witchcraft", but these
were abductive reasoning, seeing effects and guessing at individual, short-
timescale past causes, rather than inductive reasoning, seeing events and
proposing prinicples that would explain/predict future events.

~~~
mixmax
I don't think your explanation is correct, simply because it doesn't give an
evolutionary advantage to pray for something that may or may not come true. On
the contrary you spend precious resources on something superfluous.

~~~
hugh3
I'm not sure the grandparent ever claimed there was an evolutionary advantage
to religion.

Humans do many things "naturally" which were never really selected for.
Stubbing our toes, becoming alcoholic, dying during childbirth... these are
things which are just incidental consequences of how our bodies are built.

I suspect religion is "natural" in the same sense. We're born with a sense of
cause and effect, so when we see effects we hypothesise causes. Our brains
have a pretty good sense of human psychology, so we wind up ascribing human
psychological motivations to non-human objects too. Pretty soon we've
attributed everything in the universe to invisible, powerful and
psychologically human beings acting out of some kind of comprehensible motive.

Again, Aboriginal mythology gives us good examples. It seems that every major
geographical feature is actually the consequence of some kind of nice
comprehensible family drama, eg.
[http://www.bluemts.com.au/tourist/thingsToDo/threeSisters.as...](http://www.bluemts.com.au/tourist/thingsToDo/threeSisters.asp)

~~~
mixmax
The grandparent didn't claim that there was an evolutionary advantage to
religion, but he _did_ claim that the human species started doing something
that has no evolutionary advantage _(we invented prayer)_.

As you correctly point out the traits we have are either an advantage or an
artifact of an advantage. Inventing prayer is neither of those.

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henryw
Here's an interesting quote:

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.

Their source: Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

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westbywest
This is perhaps misleading, and not just because IQ tests have known
social/cultural biases.The same data will likely show similar disparities in
IQ between other complimentary groups, e.g. between children with well-
educated and less-educated parents or even between boys and girls.

~~~
hugh3
_e.g. between children with well-educated and less-educated parents_

Well surely we should expect a genuine difference in intelligence between
children of well-educated and less-educated parents? At least under the
assumptions:

a) Intelligence is at least partly heritable, and

b) More intelligent people are likely to get more education

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yosho
I believe the author confuses correlation with causation in this article. For
example, the author suggests that being nocturnal is a trait of intelligent
people... but really, it could just be that intelligent people tend to be on
the computer more and thus sleep later due to the constant light hitting their
eyes and messing with their circadian rhythm.

~~~
sp332
It's not just this article, check out some of the other papers he's written:
[http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/s.kanazaw...](http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/s.kanazawa@lse.ac.uk)
It's like a gallery of spurious correlations.

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1053r
<sarcasm>Intelligent people come to non-obvious and novel conclusions! News at
11.</sarcasm>

