Sorry Republican and Tory Dangerous Minds readers—if there are any of you out there—don’t shoot the liberal atheist messenger. Controversial, tell it like it is, not as you’d like it to be evolutionary psychologist Dr, Satoshi Kanazawa, of the London School of Economics (co-author of the excellent book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters), has correlated the results of a massive, long term study that found young adults who said they were “very conservative” had an average adolescent IQ of 95, while the young people who said they were “very liberal” averaged 106 on the IQ scale.
11 points is a statistically significant spread. Scientists speculate that these findings may indicate evolutionary trends. Guess what else? These liberal, atheistic folks (well the males at least) also make better husbands as they are more prone to monogamy. What is Sean Hannity going to say about this?!?! This is going to drive him nuts. Olbermann should take care to twist this knife in extra hard. Clearly his viewers are smarter than Hannity’s!
“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people—people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower—are likely to be the ones to do that.”
Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with “unconventional” philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be “ways to communicate to everyone that you’re pretty smart,” he said.
The study looked at a large sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which began with adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The participants were interviewed as 18- to 28-year-olds from 2001 to 2002. The study also looked at the General Social Survey, another cross-national data collection source.
Kanazawa did not find that higher or lower intelligence predicted sexual exclusivity in women. This makes sense, because having one partner has always been advantageous to women, even thousands of years ago, meaning exclusivity is not a “new” preference.
For men, on the other hand, sexual exclusivity goes against the grain evolutionarily. With a goal of spreading genes, early men had multiple mates. Since women had to spend nine months being pregnant, and additional years caring for very young children, it made sense for them to want a steady mate to provide them resources.
Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger.
“It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere,” Kanazawa said.
Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ (CNN)