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The Scientific FundamentalistA Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature

by Satoshi Kanazawa

Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like other

species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic toward their genetic kin,

their friends and allies, and members of their deme (a group of

intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group. They are not designed to be

altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are

not likely ever to meet or interact with. This is largely because our

ancestors lived in a small band of 50-150 genetically related individuals,

and large cities and nations with thousands and millions of people are

themselves evolutionarily novel.

The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of

World Cultures, which describes allhuman cultures known to anthropology

(more than 1,500) in great detail, as well as extensive primary

ethnographies of traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined

above is absent in these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources,

especially food, is quite common and often mandatory among hunter-

gatherer tribes, and while trade with neighboring tribes often takes place,

there is no evidence that people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands

freelyshare resources with members of other tribes.

Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the

very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does

not qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its

absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used

as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to infer

that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or is

not likely ever to meet that is, liberalism was not part of our ancestral

life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the Hypothesis

would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than less

intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.

Analyses of large representative samples, from both the United States and

the United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more

intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less

intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those who

identify themselves as very liberal in early adulthood have a mean

childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as very

Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than ConservativesLiberals think theyre more intelligent than conservatives because they are

Published on March 21, 2010 by Satoshi Kanazawa in The Scientific Fundamentalist

Harriet Hayes: I dont even know what the sides are in the culture wars.

Matt Albie: Well, your side hates my side because you think we think you are

stupid, and my side hates your side because we think you are stupid.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Nevada Day, Part I

It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may

reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary

United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness

to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern

political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of

individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually

support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually

oppose them.

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Satoshi Kanazawa is an

evolutionary psychologist at LSE and

the coauthor (with the late Alan S.Miller) ofWhy Beautiful People Have

More Daughters.

more...

There are all sorts of reasons why parents want

their children to resemble them physically,

Christopher Peterson, Ph.D.

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conservative in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.

Even though past studies show that women are more liberal than men, and

blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood intelligence on

adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either sex or race.

So it appears that, as the Hypothesis predicts, more intelligent individuals

are more likely to espouse the value of liberalism than less intelligentindividuals, possibly because liberalism is evolutionarily novel and

conservatism is evolutionarily familiar.

The primary means that citizens of capitalist democracies contribute their

private resources for the welfare of the genetically unrelated others is

paying taxes to the government for its social welfare programs. The fact

that conservatives have been shown to give more money to charities than

liberals is notinconsistent with the prediction from the Hypothesis; in fact, it

supports the prediction. Individuals can normally choose and select the

beneficiaries of their charity donations. For example, they can choose to

give money to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, because they want to

help them, but not to give money to the victims of the earthquake in Chile,

because they dont want to help them. In contrast, citizens do not have

any control over whom the money they pay in taxes benefit. They cannot

individually choose to pay taxes to fund Medicare, because they want to

help elderly white people, but not AFDC, because they dont want to help

poor black single mothers. This may precisely be why conservatives

choose to give more money to individual charities of their choice while

opposing higher taxes.

Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints

among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that liberals control

the media or the show business or the academia or some other social

institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in

their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or

the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in

life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail,

liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because

liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they

are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily

novel) modern life.

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