June 19, 2012
The Disadvantage of Smarts
An interview from The Economist with Satoshi Kanazawa on intelligence and evolution:
What, if any, evolutionary advantage does intelligence give us?
Actually, less intelligent people are better at doing most things. In the ancestral environment general intelligence was helpful only for solving a handful of evolutionarily novel problems.
You mean our ancestors did not really have to reason?
Evolution equipped humans with solutions for a whole range of problems of survival and reproduction. All they had to do was to behave in the ways in which evolution had designed them to behave—eat food that tastes good, have sex with the most attractive mates. However, for a few evolutionarily novel problems, evolution equipped us with general intelligence so that our ancestors could reason in order to solve them. These evolutionarily novel problems were few and far between. Basically, dealing with any type of major natural disaster that is very infrequent in occurrence would require general intelligence.
More here.
Posted by Henry Molofsky at 04:02 AM | Permalink
Comments
Why give this buffoon any airtime? He's a racist and a sexist; he has no formal training in biology, paleontology, or human evolution; the biological anthropologists I know loathe him. He was fired from Psychology Today after writing an article that claimed that black women were seen as ugly because they were estrogen-deficient.
He makes sweeping claims with no or minimal evidence, but gets media attention because his claims reinforce common stereotypes and biases.
Posted by: Karen Lofstrom | Jun 19, 2012 4:01:38 PM
"Intelligent women make the worst kind of parents"
Nice.
Posted by: Carlos | Jun 19, 2012 5:42:29 PM
This guy's whole career is a testament to the advantages of being an idiot.
Posted by: CV | Jun 19, 2012 7:29:02 PM
Wow.
General intelligence certainly doesn't seem to be needed to get past the novel evolutionary problem of becoming a reader at the London School of Economics.
Posted by: icastico | Jun 19, 2012 11:52:13 PM
The way Kanazawa supports his points is a little sketchy, for sure. But his contention that average intelligence is almost always sufficient for the most important things that humans have to do is very hard to disprove. If we fail as a species, it will be because of some very smart people in the corporatocracy, in weapons technology and in biotech. It will not be because the great unwashed is just too stupid to manage these devastations.
About being a mother both real good and real smart? THAT'S politically incorrect, isn't it? Instead of believing Kanazawa, why don't you survey mothers with IQs of 160 and up? Then, survey mothers with IQs between 115 and 125. Then come to your own conclusions about which group has more happy, effective, calm and cheerful women in it, women who are able to give their best quality of attention to their most important job -- without suffering hideously, that is. I think what Kanazawa is saying is that past and current folkways are hostile to highly intelligent women who become mothers, not that extremely intelligent women are hostile to their children.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 20, 2012 12:30:10 AM
Or, we could fail when 'the great unwashed' becomes too successful reproductively, cuts down too many trees, and exhausts too much arable land.
If only a smart person or two were on hand, then someone could generalize from particular, seemingly successful acts to long-term failure.
No wonder evolution selects for both.
Posted by: sjg | Jun 20, 2012 9:56:37 AM
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