Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa PhD is a reader in Management and an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics. His research uses evolutionary psychology to analyze social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology. In 2003, in an article in the Journal of Research in Personality, he showed that scientists generally made their biggest discovery before their mid-30s, and compared this productivity curve to that of criminals.
In 2006 Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, claiming that attractive people are 26% less likely to have male offspring. In a letter to the editors, Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman points out that a correct interpretation of the regression coefficients in Kanazawa’s analysis is that attractive people are 8% more likely to have girls, an error that Kanazawa acknowledges. Gelman further argues that Kanazawa’s analysis does not convincingly show causality, because of possible endogeneity as well as problematic interpretations of statistical significance in multiple comparisons. While Kanazawa claims that the former error is “merely linguistic” and that he addressed the latter two in his initial article, Gelman maintains that his original criticism remains valid.
Kanazawa has co-written three books with Alan Miller: “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire—Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do”, Why Men Gamble and Women Buy Shoes: How Evolution Shaped the Way We Behave and Order by Accident: The Origins and Consequences of Conformity in Contemporary Japan. He also writes a blog entitled The Scientific Fundamentalist for Psychology Today. Kanazawa is credited with coining the term Savanna principle: the theory that societal difficulties are due to the fact that the human brain evolved in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, a drastically different environment from today’s urban, industrial society.
Commenting on the criticism directed against some evolutionary psychology theories, Kanazawa has stated that “The only responsibility that scientists have is to the truth, nothing else. Scientists are not responsible for the potential or actual consequences of the knowledge they create.”
Commenting on the War on Terror, Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa claimed that “there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history.” He then offers the following thought experiment: “Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost. Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running (Hillary Clinton, ed.)”.
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