Atheism and intelligence

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See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 132655.htm

Are they sure they have all their items covered on being instinctively up to date? They forgot whole swaths of the population:

1) Entitlement brats - to believe the world inherently owes you nothing and that you weren't simply born great would be of lesser intelligence.

2) People who prefer to let their emotions out and whine about everything rather than solving their own problems or keeping a stiff upper lip - which of course again, the later is less intelligent as its not evolutionarily 'novel'.

3) People who want government to solve as many problems for them, preferably take care of them from womb to tomb - another very cutting edge and avant garde approach, believing that people should be self-sufficient and thrive on independence and their own abilities to problem solve would have to be of lesser intelligence.

4) Knowing how to cuss out a teacher and be proud of it - again, huge leaps ahead of those who wouldn't.

5) Being a sit-com addict to where the extent of your social skills revolves around quoting lines from shows and movies; just one more sign yet of higher IQ than those who simply don't care as much for TV.

6) Not exercising, simply playing video games and getting obese - brilliant.

7) Living in your own bubble because being raised on TV, movies, cartoons, and grade school fashion cleaved all sense of reality of the human condition - very 'novel' to our age.


I could probably muster many more if I wanted to make this an all day marathon...

Well, they didn't say stupid people didn't do things that were evolutionarily novel too. I think what they meant, though, was that more intelligent people are a little more likely to diverge from the status quo on issues of religion, politics, and the structuring of society.

Neant, I forgot to mention, this article brings up a whole other dynamic as well, ie. if your brought up in Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/Zoroastrian/Bahi/Rastafarian/Shinto/John Frum/Spiritual but Not religious surroundings and you find yourself to be atheist - you're forward thinking. If however your surroundings and local culture are atheist and you're an atheist, you're not forward thinking - however you could be if you instead chose to be Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/Rastafarian/Zoroastrian/Bahi/Shinto/John Frum or Spiritual but not religious.

I wonder if it would work the same way for liberalism vs. conservatism - that to be a liberal with conservative surroundings or conservative with liberal surroundings would be forward thinking as opposed to a conservative with conservative surroundings or a liberal with liberal surroundings? If we're taken the article at its premise it seems that this is quite a likely match as well, not to mention going to bed late in Iowa and going to bed early in New York City.

I question the categorization of monogamy as evolutionarily novel. Various indications are that it's been the norm since homo erectus 2,000,000 years ago.

Their definition of "liberal" is a fairly strange use of the word. By their definition I'm "liberal", but politically I lean slightly conservative.

Men often wish to be polygynous, though.


Yeah, a lot of papers that try to study political opinions give really screwy definitions. The whole idea seems to be little more than ego-stroking on the part of some ideologically driven researchers.

I do not think you have actually understood the article's contents. Most of the things you list are not evolutionarily novel. Narcissists and whiners have always existed.

Consider the issue eating and exercise. As it happens the possibility of large sections of the population grossly overeating and refusing to exercise to their physical detriment is too evolutionarily novel for there to be any evolutionary propensity toward either choice. It's completely irrelevant to the hypothesis described in the article because the hypothesis is describing a counteraction of evolutionary cognitive/gestalt propensities. From an evolutionary prospective, food is a necessary resource and usually scarce, so there is no evolutionary propensity to choose to eat moderately; it has not had opportunity to evolve. The evolutionary default would be to eat as much as possible when the opportunity presents itself and to conserve energy though not engaging in unnecessary physical exertion.

I think that your objections are not on the basis of what is or might be true, but rather on the basis of prejudice; you infer particular things from what is presented and do not like the inferences and so challenge the source from which you elaborated the inferences. I do not think the inferences are actually particularly realistic.

Take two groups, one more intelligent than the other. The less intelligent group assume that X is true and never question this. The more intelligent group question the truth of X, but because there is insufficient evidence to establish the truth or non-truth of X by relying on intelligence, the group ends up with half believing X is true and half believing X is not true. If we then re-categorized the members of both groups into "those who believe X is true" and "those who believe X is untrue" the intelligence of the second group will be higher because most members will have come from the higher intelligence group. However, any member of the group that believes X is true, could be one of the members from the initial "higher intelligence" group. Keep in mind that the intelligence measures described are averages for the group as a whole and do not necessarily reflect accurately on the intelligence of any one particular member of either group.

The point is that higher intelligence correlates to doubtful consideration of views and perspectives that have historically entailed an evolutionary advantage. As a result, people with "higher intelligence" are disproportionately more likely to end up having an opinion out of step with evolutionary propensities when compared to "less intelligent" people who are apparently more influenced by evolutionary propensity in the area of perspective and belief forming.

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

Bushwa.

"being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel."

And how many professed liberals actually do?

Hogwash.

Paranoia may say, I must propitiate the Zombie. OR paranoia may say, There must not be a God because he would judge me.

Altruism may be genetically novel, though the reasoning of the piece is irretrievably flawed. But liberalism as we know it is far from altruistic.

And would you say conservatism is altruistic?

I once heard a guy say. "Just because it's in print, doesn't mean it's true." Now whoes smarter than who? "Oh you believe this printed information to be true, and Bob believes that printed information to be the trueth. You are smarter than Bob, just because you picked catagory A, and not catagory B." mmhmmm. Thus, if someone gets all their intellectual bits, trueths and pieces from printed materials, where does that leave them?

Gotta remember that line . . . anyway, with respect to the topic, this is an old pattern. Back in the Middle Ages (Medieval Era, not to be confused with the dark ages which preceded) the church was in control and ruled through fear (keeping the working class afraid so the higher ups could get fat . . . which is still an old pattern) for keeping people ignorant kept them safe from uprising. However, if there was a surprisingly bright individual born to the "working class," two things could happen: 1) He'd join the church and rise through the ranks, not giving a damn about his origins or 2) He'd learn about what the "ruling" group was doing and try to start an uprising . . . assuming he isnt caught and burned at the stake for being a witch first. I think the saying, "To be intelligent is to be paranoid" is probably more accurate since a power hungry leadership fears losing the supposed power it gains . . . luckily, fear tends to make intelligent power mongers stupid in the end . Turnabout is fair play and all . . .

I think the only thing you may have taken away from it more than I did was weighing against evolutionary history of humanity vs. the values of the day that are on their way out that people of habit would have more proclivity to. Other than that though, there are a lot of different directions you can go from evolutionary norms that are well below the mark as well as above, as well as things like nocturnality which seem neither here nor there in our society though would have for sure been detrimental in hunter gather society where sleep was for your protection and your productivity during the day mattered in a life and death sort of way much more intimately than now.


While I agree with the structure of your inference and have to concur that people who do examine for themselves and seek the truth will still fall on different sides of the arguments based on what they find or how they see the world, I don't believe that in this day and age atheism/liberalism enjoy a status of being fringy or edgy enough to have only examiners of reality. In America, especially in big cities and on the coasts, its much more common than conservatism, atheism in its strong form may not be supercommon but if you add in agnostics and the truly indifferent/secular you might be looking at a slight majority. Pooling those last three together, as well as looking at liberalism against conservatism, at least people of generation X and Y like myself, liberalism has been that much of a staple to the point where there are just as many people examining reality vs. just not caring and going with whatever is popular as there are conservatives who break in both directions, same with the atheism/theism issue.

In this day and age, just to shore this up - this isn't the society that Democritus came from, its not even the society that Spinoza, Dostoevsky, or Schopenhauer came from - back then I could see a qualitative intelligence argument being employed on their novelty. If you watch TV, at least in the USA and I can only imagine its the obvious in Europe and the UK as well - atheism is far from a rarity and liberalism likely even less so.

I also have to add - if what you're saying is true and the belief is that being theistic/religious is more evolutionarily prominent than atheistic - how is that figured? Are there really tangible signs that people much more often believed in a deity without trying? This sounds like a guess that would overlook the possibility that just as many potential atheists have existed all through time but prior to science they had the intuition - simply felt that they had no ground to stand on as there was no in depth framework of understanding science or the world so they couldn't refute the theists. Faith in that sense seemed like when it overshadowed those who don't believe did so more in a frame of reference to societal control structures and ingrained customs where you're more often coerced. Just like you mentioned that narcissists and whiners have existed all through time, I have a hard time believing that the genetic potential for atheists and theists was all that much different - unless you have something that isolates the 'faith' gene and statistically shows something along those lines?

sand: excellent find.

The article stated that the areas of difference that correlated to intelligence were areas of evolutionary novelty
I am not sure what you are referring to actually. The article is not about good or bad choices, or about whether one conforms or rebels against their own socieities values, or values of the day.....

But in so far as the article and the reported research goes, this is entirely irrelevant. Not least of all because the reserch is not commenting on the intelligence of any individual. If you make up one group of people with average and below intelligence and another with people with average and above, and then you split the second group evenly distributing intelligence between the two subgroups then add one of the subgroups to the average and below (intelligence) group, the group comprised of half the average and above people will have a higher average intelligence than the other larger group even though there are just as many high intelligence people in the larger group.

But more significantly, the article and the research were not commenting on what you appear to think they were commenting on. Being fringy or edgy has nothing to do with it. It is not about whether or not a person conforms to current values or values that are popular in their society or is a free thinker. It is about a correlation between intelligence and acceptance of views and ideas that are evolutionarily novel. The article explains what the concept means and it does not have anything to do with how avant garde an idea or belief is within one's current society, but rather what its evolutionary utility to your ancestors.


None of which makes these things any less evolutionarily novel which is what this article and the research is about. How trendy an idea is now does not determine or measure its evolutionary novelty.

The article and research do not refer to or comment on "novelty" but rather evolutionary novelty. This is a particular concept with a distinct meaning (described in the article).


Magico/religico beliefs are ubiquitous to human groups.


Are there signs people much more hunted without trying?

Whether effort was involved is not relevant. The point is how common the ideas/view points were throughout evolutionary history. Magico/religico beliefs are ubiquitious to human groups/socieities/cultures. There is very strong evidence for considering them to be "evolutionarily familiar". Whether or not this entailed more effort than not bothering is not the point.


The premise that there has been some genetic change is something that you have introduced that is not consistent with the interpretation in the article you object to...it's a straw man in other words. I honesty do think you have misinterpreted this article and what it is reporting.

Pandd, I think I might have isolated the problem.

When you have your higher intelligence level group analyzing for truth and going either way, what's your suggestion on how the lower-level intelligence group chooses their beliefs or perhaps 'falls into' them?

I think it'd probably do with the fact poorer people are generally more religious and thus more socially conservative than anything else. Intelligence is pretty subjective too.