The disadvantage of smarts
economist.com
economist.com
Whaa??? That's the kind of thing you just can't assert without a mountain of evidence. I'm actually surprised he stopped short of saying that they're more likely to be white because the first humans evolved with darker skin tones.
This is reactor-grade crackpottery.
Neither is more adaptive globally on evolutionary time scales, so your strawman doesn't seem a fair generalization of his theorizing.
Which of these points do you take issue with, specifically?:
[1]. Intelligent people are more likely to be homosexual.,
[2]. Humans are evolutionarily designed to reproduce heterosexually., or
[3]. The causal relationship, [2] --> [1]
Are you really expecting a "mountain of evidence" in a blog post?
His main point, that intelligent people are more likely to seek novelty and deviate from evolutionary norms, seems plausible. And it's almost certainly addressed in greater detail by one of the many pointers to suggested reading.
Hard to take seriously a person who would say that.
I'd agree that humans (and other animals) have likely been consuming things for psychoactive effect as far back as such substances could be found... but a wee bit of consumption doesn't invalidate Kanazawa's point. We've gotten a lot better at collecting, cultivating, creating, and consuming psychoactives, in evolutionarily-recent history.
Europeans had to learn about tobacco from the new world. Tobacco's been bred to be stronger since the introduction of agriculture... just as our cultivated fruits are far sweeter than their natural precursors.
Evidence of alcoholic fermentation goes back perhaps 10K years (skimming Wikipedia). But even if the practice is quite a bit older, it's still 'evolutionarily recent'. Our primate ancestors might have happened across some fermented juice occasionally... they couldn't pick up a six-pack at the Kwik-E-Mart every night.
Finding and consuming exactly the right mushroom/cactus alkaloid for creating visions, and not the other ones that kill you, has become a lot easier with literate traditions. And pills made in chemistry labs.
What was a trickle of opportunities among our primate forebears – a level they would have presumably adapted for – is now a torrent. Kanazawa's point here seems sound in the broad-generalizing sense in which it was offered.
Being intelligent complicates your life sometime. I suspect that you're more likely to get a depression too.
Even if I share this link on Facebook, most people would agree with this article, relate to a few points and think they're intelligent.
His basic argument seems to be that intelligent people are always contrarians, which to me seems downright false. Smart people just have a tendency to be more skeptical, really. I guess framing things this way would not be as inflammatory, however, and thus not sell as many books or get The Economist to offer the dude a piece of its precious real estate.
Finally: More intelligent boys (but not more intelligent girls) are more likely to grow up to value sexual exclusivity. = I would love to see what kind of data (if any) he is using to back this up. Sounds really fishy to me.
TLDR; author claims that intelligent people are paranoid freaks that prefer evolutionarily stupid things. What things are evolutionarily stupid? Sterility, monogamy, homosexuality, and other manifestations of social order.
Or, a scientific spin on fundamentalism.
Kanazawa makes a claim that intelligent men are more likely to prefer monogamy because the evolutionary norm is polygamy.
The reporter/interviewer says "Really?". Because, here's the thing, Kanazawa's argument at this point doesn't hold. Just because somebody is good at something, does not mean they prefer it. Just because intelligent people are good at adapting to evolutionarily novel things does not mean they prefer to do those things.
Where does the preference come from? According to Kanazawa, because of paranoia. Humans appear to be designed to be paranoid; they are designed to see intentional agents behind natural phenomena.
"This is because making the mistake of thinking that a natural event has an intentional agent behind it is less potentially costly than being oblivious and thinking that an intentional event, like someone trying to kill you, has a coincidental cause. The paranoid outlive the oblivious."
I believe that at this point, he's referring to humans in general. Humans in general are paranoid. Intelligent people are extra paranoid, hence they don't want to do the evolutionarily normal thing, they want to do the evolutionarily novel thing.
He mentions paranoia as a 'designed to be' trait. He directly links paranoia as an explanation for belief in God, and says the intelligent are more likely to be atheist. That pretty strongly suggests 'paranoia' is one of the ancestral norms from which he thinks the intelligent are now tending to deviate.
Okay, the first "things" and the second "things" is a semantic equivocation. Evolutionarily novel "things" would be cigarettes, for instance. Some of us "adapt" to them in that there is an explanation that explains why such a thing does not ultimately lead to our extinction. Certainly no one preferred cigarettes before adaptation occurred; the most basic way to look at this is that the members of the species who were more likely to adapt to gaining pleasure from cigarettes out-lived, statistically speaking, those who were less likely to adapt to gaining pleasure from cigarettes. The presence of the (simplifying) "cigarette-gene" _disappears_.
He's not explaining preferences in the sense you're addressing. Evolution works more like picking teams on a pick up grade school game. It's not that you _prefer_ to pick the fat kid, it's just that on average, they're all fat kids. And that's the lot you get.
Of course, evolution has the universe as its lot.
Citation please?
Okay. Your right. Instead I am going to talk about the conclusions the article makes.
"Because reproductive success is the ultimate goal of all living organisms, so intelligent women are more likely to go against such evolutionary design."
If were going to go ahead and define the most important things in life as the most evolutionarily viable ones, then we've already ceded way too much ground. And even this argument doesn't take into account things like overpopulation, if everyone tried to maximize baby output, we'd fill the planet up mighty quick. So it may actually make sense to reproduce less, but not necessarily not at all.
"My theory would also predict that intelligent men should be less likely to become parents, but data do not confirm that. Some suggest that women prefer to have children with more intelligent men, but the data contradict this too."
If the data already contradicts your hypothesis, then why say it?
"Men’s income or education has no effect on their likelihood of becoming parents. Intelligence doesn’t allow us to do better what we are designed by evolution to do."
Designed is a misnomer, natural selection works because those who survive are the ones represented. We weren't "designed" to do anything. Were here because the people before us had babies. It is preferable that we continue to have babies so that people will exist in the future, but raw baby making isn't everything. Our "Evolutionarily novel" environment was made through the use of intelligence. On a societal level intelligence is important to create novel inventions which keep more humans alive long enough to make babies. If intelligent people don't reproduce, but the populations that they spawn in stay alive longer than dumber populations, then the people who have recessive intelligence genes that let them occasionally spawn a genius will do just fine, leaving intelligent people in the system and making them evolutionarily valuable.
Of course, on a individual scale this may not work out too well for the intelligent people.
With all that in mind, in the spirit of Fermi's Paradox: If intelligence isn't evolutionarily valuable, and is in fact negatively correlated with evolutionary success, then why are the smart people still here? (In non-trivial numbers.)
I am not sure what "intelligent persons" the writer researched before writing the article, but the points are very misleading and wrong.
He's a management professor.
Flagged as BS.
>Because reproductive success is the ultimate goal of all living organisms
I know it's popular and often interesting to examine evolutionary motivation for behavior, but there's a line crossed in saying it's the ultimate goal for all life.
We have a long history of celibate lifestyles. We have a long history of discovering motivations that supercede our biological imperatives.
This is an article with some vaguely cited statistics and some vaguely stated opinions.
There isn't even the basic attempt to qualify the most important things in life. It seems that this is because the submitted title is linkbait and much different from the actual title ('The Disadvantage of Smarts,' hardly better); the content seems to be a low-key low-detail interview.
the more I look at this the more I suspect ballot-stuffing to get this to the front page. 13 points and it's at #4 after 48 minutes?
Well, I guess that fulfills my grumpy quota for a while.
"... the ultimate goal of all living organisms."
"Life" is vague and philosophically interesting; "living organism" is less so, and if philosophically interesting, it's interesting for different reasons.
"Intelligent people are less likely to have babies? Oh, good riddance, then! Less children means a smaller drain on our planet's natural resources and is an essential measure toward letting us catch up to our growth to a point where we can adequately provide for everyone...
...Oh god -- I wouldn't be a very good evolutionary parent, would I?"