Liberal Atheists Are Smarter

(The following is the meaty middle from a much longer text by Douglas Kenrick, borrowed from psychologytoday.com)

Satoshi Kanazawa has posted a couple of blog entries, complete with graphs, suggesting that people who say they are “not at all religious” have about 6 IQ points on those who say they are “very religious,” and that those who are “very liberal” have an average of about 12 IQ points over those who are “very conservative.”

How does that work? The argument is one that was advanced, along with some supportive data, by my colleague Jason Weeden (one of those overly educated types who has both a law degree and a Ph.D. in social psychology. I’ll leave it to you to guess what his political leanings are).

Here it is in a nutshell:

1. Smart people are more likely to go to college.

2. If you are going to get a college degree, it helps to delay starting a family.

3. Smart people still have sexual drives.

4. If you don’t want to wait till you are in your mid- to late- 20s to start having sex, but aren’t ready to settle down, you have liberal attitudes about sexual behavior, birth control, and abortion.

On the other side of the coin, if you are not going to go to college, and you want to have a family early, you don’t want a lot of promiscuous people running around – available unattached sexually experimenting people disrupt monogamous families. Early reproducing women don’t want those “loose women” hanging around tempting their husbands, because that means less resources for their children, and a possible divorce. Early reproducing men don’t want promiscuous men lurking around, because they want to be sure that those children they’re supporting are their own.

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In personal response to today's poll I've visited 22 of the 50 United States. The Northeast and the deep Southeast territories still beckon unsuccessfully.

=lefty=