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Liberals, Atheists Are More Highly Evolved?
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Mar 08, 2010 06:52am |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Monday, March 8, 2010 12:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Your apelike ancestors probably aren't top of mind when you enter the polling booth. But a new study suggests that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you're liberal or conservative—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe in God, or whether you've got a cheatin' heart.
It's all linked to the evolution of intelligence, says author Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Kanazawa's theory is that intelligence—particularly our ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as a sudden forest fire.
Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn't likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to "know" how to do. Surviving the fire required both the ability to think up a new behavior, and the willingness to try it out.
Passed down via genetics, those two traits are still the calling cards of an intelligent brain—expressed as a tendency toward adopting nontraditional social values and preferences, Kanazawa says in his new study, published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
As a result of their iconoclastic ancestry, he suggests, people with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively new to human life—liberalism, atheism, staying up late, and (for men) monogamy, for example.
This tendency toward iconoclasm stems from smart people's brains being better adapted to dealing with new situations, according to Kanazawa.
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