Liberals and atheists are smarter

"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.

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.

Rightardia comment: Other studies have shown that conservatives are more fearful about the world than liberals. in addition, Lawrence Kohlberg did a lot of research on conventional and post-conventional thought. 

Post-conventional or liberal people have almost always attended college and develop liberal thought  in their mid-thirties or later. Although such post-conventional thinkers can understand lower level conventional or conservative thinking, conventional thinkers have a much harder time understanding liberal ideas.

The health care debate heightened the differences of thinking between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives were prone to gross exaggeration and incendiary language. 

The Tea Partiers seemed to the least astute group of conservatives. The Tea Partiers feared health care changes which should have made them less fearful. Clearly IQ and education had something to do with the extreme perceptions Tea Partiers has toward universal health care and change in general.

See the complete article at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm

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