[groth]

Catchy title, but very suspicious article.

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.

[gojomo]

Actually, Kanazawa implies intelligent people are less paranoid, because paranoia was the evolutionary norm.

[groth]

I think you're misreading the article.

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.

[gojomo]

But Kanazawa's schtick for this piece is: 'humans are designed/evolved to do X, so intelligent tend to be more Y in contrast'.

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.

[nerdfiles]

> Just because intelligent people are good at adapting to evolutionarily novel things does not mean they prefer to do those things.

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.