Relocating To Elfland

A recent ABC article reporting on the work of Satoshi Kanazawa has me a tad worked up. The reason, you will shortly discover, is that I am evolutionarily challenged and (understandably) defensive about it.

Bottom line, says Kanazawa, smart people tend to become liberals and atheists (rejecting religious values); and smart men tend to value relational fidelity (adopting family values), while this isn’t necessarily true for smart women (who have always had strong family values, and still do).

Dimwits like me, by contrast, tend to remain stuck in religious values; the males among us also remain “mildly polygamous,” while our females continue to value fidelity as they always have, and as their brighter female counterparts still do.

The data supporting all this is pretty thin, when you get right down to it. About 20,000 kids are interviewed in their teens, and again in their 20s, and lo! the smart ones have become more liberal, more atheistic, and . . . well, things are a bit fuzzier in their family values, because the smart guys are starting to value faithfulness, while the smart girls aren’t appreciably different from the dumb ones – they all want relationships that last. Hmmmm. . . . “The participants were all in their twenties, and ‘the findings from them [says Kanazawa] may or may not generalize to all Americans across generations.” You think??? I wonder what IQ it took to figure that one out.

Something else I don’t get (nota bene: I am not one of the bright ones): all of this is supposedly thrilling in view of evolution. Bright people, i.e., the evolutionarily advanced ones, have this cool capacity for things “evolutionarily novel.” For example, it’s so weird that smart kids eventually become liberals – they actually start to care about other people – because ordinarily in evolution it’s survival of the fitter. Those who remain stuck in uncaring conservatism, now, they make sense; they are evolutionarily predictable.

But (if I may) doesn’t this really change the rules in evolution? I mean, the whole idea of natural selection assumes certain adaptational patterns, most notably that features which make for higher survival and reproduction will gradually prevail over those that don’t. (I didn’t make this up; I got it from Jerry Coyne, who should know.) So is it really evidence of being “smarter” or “better” or “more advanced” that one takes care of other people at great cost to oneself? Couldn’t this be construed as evolutionary regress, or at best an anomaly (read: weird)?

Never mind, though. What really kills me about Kanazawa’s findings is that they are so atrociously sexist (perhaps that needn’t trouble him, being a man of science and all). “Higher intelligence,” we are told, “had no effect on the women’s [family] values.” So what happened here? How come the smart girls don’t have the capacity for evolutionary novelty in their family values? How come they haven’t been able to get beyond predictably faithful to “mildly polygamous,” while their male counterparts are moving from “mildly polygamous” to faithful? If girls are so evolutionarily predictable on this point, doesn’t that mean they are less evolutionarily advanced than the guys? (It can’t be an IQ problem, because we know they are smarter than the dumb girls.) But . . . bear with me here . . . wouldn’t that sort of undermine the whole point of Kanazawa’s findings? Wouldn’t that mean that evolutionary novelty and predictability have precisely nothing to do with one’s IQ?

I’m not bright enough to figure out if I should be insulted by this research. I am definitely bright enough to figure out how insulted I would be if I were a bright girl.