The reasons why Atheists and Liberals are more intelligent
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Not so long ago experts predicted the imminent collapse of religion in modern western culture. Religion – often synonymous in these discussions with superstition, magic, and delusion – would at last give way to the autonomy of human reason and the power of the experimental method of natural investigation. But something happened on the way to religion’s funeral. People kept on believing. Recent neuroscientific and evolutionary research has suggested that either many of the hallmarks of religion are, or are byproducts of, adaptations that helped our earliest ancestors survive.
The more that has been learned about the way our brains and our genes function it is the evolutionarily novel lack of religious belief and practices that is truly puzzling. A recent study by Satoshi Kanazawa provocatively titled, “Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent,” suggests that people that are more intelligent are able to overcome the limitations of our evolutionary past. In other words, the smarter you are the more likely you are to be an atheist. Kanazawa proposes what he calls the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” as an explanation for the “origin of values and preferences” in human mental and social life. The hypothesis consists of a combination of the “Savanna Principle” and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence previously proposed by the author that suggests general intelligence evolved as a “domain-specific adaptation for the domain of evolutionarily novel, nonrecurrent problems” such as flash floods, drought, and lightning strikes. The Savanna Principle is the idea that the “brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment” (the African savanna). The combination of these concepts leads Kanazawa to propose the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” that the constraints placed on human understanding by the ancestral environment should be stronger among those with less general intelligence and also that more intelligent people should be “better able to comprehend and deal with evolutionarily novel . . . entities and situations than less intelligent individuals”.
While this line of research and the theories that attend it are far from unanimously accepted by students of the neurological dynamics of religion it should also be noted that there is a good deal of theoretical and experimental work needed to connect the tendency to perceive supernatural agents and the related but distinct idea of belief in a single supernatural agent such as the God usually denied by modern atheists. While it may be natural for our brains to suggest the actions of spirits or even gods it is not clear that belief in a monotheistic deity – the one usually denied by modern atheists – is similarly “natural.” In other words, whatever the state of the neuro-psychological evidence, Kanazawa’s line of argument might well benefit from greater sophistication in the understanding of religion.
Many thanks to our friends at Makeahistory
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I’ve always known that Liberals and Atheists are much smarter than your average Conservative Deep South Christian.