Godless Smarties

by digby

I’m not sure I buy this, but I do enjoy the notion that it will make Rush Limbaugh’s head explode:

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly…
The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them. “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.”

I actually think evolutionary psychology is pretty flaky, so I tend to take these conclusions with a grain of salt. But if the stats do show higher IQ among those people with those beliefs, it’s interesting anyway and it further illuminates the culture war.

But what’s up with the smart women? The smart liberal men apparently figured out that being monogamous is a lot less complicated and makes more sense, but the smart females haven’t. Evolutionary psychology typically predicts that it has something to do with women needing a good man to provide for them while they sneak around for some DNA variety, but this particular study is supposed to reflect the smart, evolved types who aren’t slaves to their lizard brains. So, what’s up with that? Are smart women really more inclined to sleep around? Or are the smart men lying?

h/t to bb
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