Are liberals and atheists smarter? Satoshi Kanazawa

According to the Star, in new research bound to irk conservative geniuses, people with high IQs are deemed more likely to be liberal, monogamous non-believers than those who are less intelligent. In an article for Social Psychology Quarterly, Kanazawa lays out facts based on U.S. data to support his theory. According to that research, young adults who identify as "not at all religious" had an average IQ of 103 as teens, while those who identified as "very religious" had an average IQ of 97. Similarly, young adults who called themselves "very liberal" had an average IQ of 106 during adolescence, while those who identified themselves as "very conservative" had average IQs of 95.

Kanazawa believes there are evolutionary reasons behind this. Ten thousand years ago, when humans were hunter-gatherers, we mated, tended to our kin and fled when danger was in the air – activities that did not require much intelligence. Kanazawa says humans were thus biologically designed to be conservative and put a high value on family.

The U.S. data also show a relationship between male adolescent intelligence and how much, as adults, they came to value sexual exclusivity. The more intelligent the male respondents were, the more they believed in monogamy.

Kanazawa says future research will explore whether intelligent people are more likely to buy into other evolutionarily novel values, like vegetarianism, feminism, pacifism and environmentalism. Meanwhile, he expects the average intelligence of all western populations to decline slightly in the 21st century, because more intelligent people tend to have fewer offspring. Interestingly, Kanazawa describes himself as a married atheist libertarian with a strong distaste for liberals. But, as a scientist, he says he is bound to report the facts.

FoxNews gives a slightly different opinion on the matter: "Satoshi's really suggesting that smart people are more likely to take risks and experiment. This makes sense, but only temporarily.

It just so happens that I was once an outspoken liberal, a normal state for an attention-seeking teenager with back acne. But, after awhile, I started rejecting the easy romance of leftism, as hard reality started hitting me in the face. So, while it takes brains to question the natural state of things, you need even more brains to later question the questioning. Smart people question their parents, but then smarter people realize later that their parents were right all along.

Bottom line: Braininess isn't reflected in rebellion against common sense. Instead, it's rebellion against rebellion that shows real smarts — that and an acceptance that unicorns rule and griffins suck."