The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One - Rilegato

Kanazawa, Satoshi

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0470586958 ISBN 13: 9780470586952

Casa editrice: Trade Paper Pr, 2012

Riassunto

A book that challenges common misconceptions about the nature of intelligence

Satoshi Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (written with Alan S. Miller) was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a rollicking bit of pop science that turns the lens of evolutionary psychology on issues of the day." That book answered such burning questions as why women tend to lust after males who already have mates and why newborns look more like Dad than Mom. Now Kanazawa tackles the nature of intelligence: what it is, what it does, what it is good for (if anything). Highly entertaining, smart (dare we say intelligent?), and daringly contrarian, The Intelligence Paradox will provide a deeper understanding of what intelligence is, and what it means for us in our lives.

• Asks why more intelligent individuals are not better (and are, in fact, often worse) than less intelligent individuals in solving some of the most important problems in life—such as finding a mate, raising children, and making friends
• Discusses why liberals are more intelligent than conservatives, why atheists are more intelligent than the religious, why more intelligent men value monogamy, why night owls are more intelligent than morning larks, and why homosexuals are more intelligent than heterosexuals
• Explores how the purpose for which general intelligence evolved—solving evolutionarily novel problems—allows us to explain why intelligent people have the particular values and preferences they have

Challenging common misconceptions about the nature of intelligence, this book offers surprising insights into the cutting-edge of science at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and intelligence research.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Satoshi Kanazawa was one of the inaugural contributors to the Psychology Today blog and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology. He is a Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Dalla quarta di copertina

Seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes once observed that intelligence must be equally distributed among humans, because no one ever complained that they didn't get as much as everyone else. Of course, that was before the invention of the IQ test prompted a series of objections that the tests were biased and/or inaccurate, that intelligence can't really be measured, and that there are multiple types of intelligence. For well over a century, intelligence and what it means have been the source of endless controversy. Here comes more.

In The Intelligence Paradox, the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Satoshi Kanazawa challenges the common misconceptions about what intelligence is and what it is not, how it is measured, what it's good for, and what it's bad at. He also makes many controversial statements: liberals are, on average, more intelligent than conservatives; atheists are more intelligent than believers; and homosexuals are more intelligent than heterosexuals. And using the latest research, he shows each one to be true.

At its core, Kanazawa's message is that intelligence, while certainly an asset, is one human trait among many, and it is in no way a measure of human worth. He reveals how the purposefor which general intelligence evolved?solving evolutionarily novel problems that were rarely encountered during life on the savanna?allows us to understand why the most intelligent people have the particular values and preferences they have. He also explains why, despite their huge brains, the most intelligent people are often less successful than their less intelligent relatives at solving life's most important problems.

Kanazawa uses the findings of several large long-term studies to examine the relationship between intelligence and numerous preferences and values. What he discovers is often surprising and sometimes, indeed, paradoxical. Intelligent men, for example, are more likely than less intelligent men to value sexual exclusivity for themselves, yet also more likely to cheat on wives or girlfriends despite what they really want. Why are intelligent people more likely than less intelligent people to be night owls and late sleepers? Precisely because it is unnatural. It may not surprise you to learn that intelligent people are more likely to prefer classical music to pop?but why on earth would they also like elevator music?

Intersecting the fields of evolutionary psychology and intelligence research, The Intelligence Paradox is guaranteed to change the way you think about all that thinking you do.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

Seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes once observed that intelligence must be equally distributed among humans, because no one ever complained that they didn't get as much as everyone else. Of course, that was before the invention of the IQ test prompted a series of objections that the tests were biased and/or inaccurate, that intelligence can't really be measured, and that there are multiple types of intelligence. For well over a century, intelligence and what it means have been the source of endless controversy. Here comes more.

In The Intelligence Paradox, the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Satoshi Kanazawa challenges the common misconceptions about what intelligence is and what it is not, how it is measured, what it's good for, and what it's bad at. He also makes many controversial statements: liberals are, on average, more intelligent than conservatives; atheists are more intelligent than believers; and homosexuals are more intelligent than heterosexuals. And using the latest research, he shows each one to be true.

At its core, Kanazawa's message is that intelligence, while certainly an asset, is one human trait among many, and it is in no way a measure of human worth. He reveals how the purposefor which general intelligence evolved?solving evolutionarily novel problems that were rarely encountered during life on the savanna?allows us to understand why the most intelligent people have the particular values and preferences they have. He also explains why, despite their huge brains, the most intelligent people are often less successful than their less intelligent relatives at solving life's most important problems.

Kanazawa uses the findings of several large long-term studies to examine the relationship between intelligence and numerous preferences and values. What he discovers is often surprising and sometimes, indeed, paradoxical. Intelligent men, for example, are more likely than less intelligent men to value sexual exclusivity for themselves, yet also more likely to cheat on wives or girlfriends despite what they really want. Why are intelligent people more likely than less intelligent people to be night owls and late sleepers? Precisely because it is unnatural. It may not surprise you to learn that intelligent people are more likely to prefer classical music to pop?but why on earth would they also like elevator music?

Intersecting the fields of evolutionary psychology and intelligence research, The Intelligence Paradox is guaranteed to change the way you think about all that thinking you do.

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The Intelligence Paradox

Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart OneBy Satoshi Kanazawa

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-58695-2

Chapter One

What Is Evolutionary Psychology?

Evolutionary psychology, at the most fundamental level, is the study of human nature. Human nature consists of what evolutionary psychologists call evolved psychological mechanisms or psychological adaptations (which are roughly synonymous with each other). Evolved psychological mechanisms provide solutions to adaptive problems (problems of survival and reproduction). Through a long process of natural and sexual selection, evolution has equipped humans with the ability to solve important problems, by allowing those who could solve the problems to live longer and reproduce more successfully and by eliminating those who couldn't. Those who had these innate solutions in their brain enjoyed distinct advantages over those who didn't, and lived longer and produced more children who survived. And their children inherited their parents' genetic tendency to solve these problems, and, in turn, lived longer and had more children themselves.

Over time there were more and more people who had these solutions in their brains and fewer and fewer people who didn't, until these innate solutions to adaptive problems became universal, characterizing all normally developing members of the human species. Human nature is therefore universal or species-typical (typical or characteristic of all members of a species). Some evolved psychological mechanisms are specific to only men or only women; others are shared by both men and women.

The important point to remember is that the psychological adaptations produce the correct solutions to the adaptive problems only in the context of the ancestral environment. Evolved psychological mechanisms are designed for and adapted to the conditions of the ancestral environment, not necessarily to those of the current environment. Evolution cannot anticipate or foresee the future, so its products—evolved psychological mechanisms—are not necessarily adapted to the conditions that emerged after they were designed. To the extent that our current environment is radically different from the ancestral environment, where our ancestors lived on the African savanna as hunter-gatherers in a small band of about 150 related individuals, then the execution of the evolved psychological mechanisms does not necessarily produce the correct solutions to the adaptive problems at hand. In fact, as you will see below, it often produces the wrong solutions.

Our ancestors were, and had been for more than a million years, hunter-gatherers, first in Africa, then elsewhere on earth. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle came to an (evolutionarily speaking) abrupt end around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was invented. The invention of agriculture at around 8,000 BC is probably the single most important event in human history. Agriculture necessitated sedentary life; our ancestors, for the first time, ceased to be nomadic and stayed put in one place. That led to permanent settlements, villages, towns, cities, houses, roads, horse carriages, bridges, buildings, governments, democracy, automobiles, airplanes, computers, and iPods. The iPods would not have been possible without agriculture and everything else it led to.

Four Core Principles of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology, in its intellectual origin, is the application of evolutionary biology to human cognition and behavior. Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists and zoologists had known that principles of evolutionary biology applied to all species in nature, except for humans. In 1992, a group of psychologists and anthropologists, following the courageous lead of E. O. Wilson, simply asked "Why not?" Why are humans exceptions to the rule of nature? Why not apply the same principles of evolutionary biology to humans as well? And thus evolutionary psychology was born, merely 20 years ago. It's a very new science. But it has made tremendous progress in its very short history.

As an application of evolutionary biology to human cognition and behavior, evolutionary psychology is based on four core principles.

1. People Are Animals

The first and most fundamental principle of evolutionary psychology is that there is nothing special about humans. This realization, that humans are not exceptions to nature but part of it, initially led the original evolutionary psychologists to apply the laws of evolution by natural and sexual selection to humans. It turns out that humans are not exceptions to nature at all, but just another animal species.

Scientists once believed that humans possessed many traits that were strictly unique to humans and that no other species had, such as culture, language, tool use, consciousness, morality, sympathy, compassion, romantic love, homosexuality, murder, and rape. This turns out to be false. Recent scientific research has shown that there is at least one other species that shares any trait that humans have. To the best of my knowledge, there are no traits that only humans have.

This, however, does not mean that humans are not unique. To quote the great sociobiologist Pierre L. van den Berghe, "Certainly we are unique, but we are not unique in being unique. Every species is unique and evolved its uniqueness in adaptation to its environment." The fact that humans are unique means that no other species have the exact constellation of traits and characteristics that humans have. If chimpanzees were exactly the same as humans in every possible way, then they would not be a separate species from humans; they would be humans. Humans are a separate species because no other species is exactly like humans.

But this is true of every species in nature: dogs, cats, giraffes, cockroaches. No other species is exactly like cockroaches. Humans as a species are just as unique and special as cockroaches, no more, no less. Every species in nature is equally unique.

The unavoidable conclusion from evolutionary biology is that there is nothing special about humans as a species, and we are just another ape species in nature. As such, all laws of biology hold for humans as they do for all other species. And this includes the law of evolution by natural and sexual selection, which states that the ultimate goal of all living organisms is reproductive success. All living organisms in nature are designed by evolution to reproduce and make as many copies of their genes as possible.

2. There Is Nothing Special about the Human Brain

For evolutionary psychologists, the brain is just another body part, like the hand or the pancreas. Just as millions of years of evolution have gradually shaped the hand or the pancreas to perform certain functions, so has evolution shaped the human brain to perform its function, which is to solve adaptive problems to help humans survive and reproduce successfully. Evolutionary psychologists apply the same laws of evolution to the human brain as they do to any other part of the human body.

Social scientists tend to believe that evolution stops at the neck. They believe that, while evolution has shaped the structure and function of every other human body part, the human brain has been immune to evolutionary history. In sharp contrast, evolutionary psychologists contend that the human brain is not an exception to the influences of evolutionary forces on the human body. Evolution does not stop at the neck; it goes all the way up.

3. Human Nature Is Innate

Just as dogs are born with innate dog nature, and cats are born with innate cat nature, humans are born with innate human nature. This follows from Principle 1 above. What is true of dogs and cats must also be true of humans. Socialization and learning are very important for humans, but humans are born with the innate capacity for cultural learning. Pierre van den Berghe continues the quote above by saying, "Culture is the uniquely human way of adapting, but culture, too, evolved biologically." Culture and learning are part of the evolutionary design for humans. Socialization merely reiterates and reinforces what is already in our brain (like the sense of right and wrong, which we share with other species).

This principle of evolutionary psychology is in clear contrast to the blank slate ("tabula rasa") assumption held by most social scientists. They contend that, because evolution stops at the neck, humans are born with a mind like a blank slate, on which cultural socialization must and can write anything whatsoever. Evolutionary psychologists strongly reject the tabula rasa assumption of the social sciences. In the memorable words of William D. Hamilton, who is universally regarded as the greatest Darwinian since Darwin, "The tabula of human nature was never rasa and it is now being read." Evolutionary psychology is devoted to reading the tabula of human nature.

4. Human Behavior Is the Product of Both Innate Human Nature and the Environment

There are a few genetic diseases, such as Huntington's disease, that are 100% determined by genes. If someone carries the affected gene, they will develop the disease no matter what their experiences or environment. An individual's eye color or blood type is also 100% determined by genes. So these (and a very few other) traits are entirely genetically determined. Otherwise, there are no human traits that are 100% determined by genes. Nor are there any serious scientists who think there are complex human behaviors that are entirely determined by genes. Contrary to what the critics of evolutionary psychology often claim, there are no genetic determinists in science.

Genes for most traits seldom express themselves in a vacuum. Their expressions—how the genes translate into behavior—often depend on and are guided by the environment. The same genes can express themselves differently depending on the context. In this sense, both innate human nature, which the genes program, and the environment in which humans grow up and live, are equally important determinants of behavior.

Many social scientists believe that human behavior is 100% determined by the environment, and genes and biology have absolutely no role to play in it. In sharp contrast, evolutionary psychologists do not believe that human behavior is 100% determined by either genes or environment alone. However, evolutionary psychologists tend to emphasize the biological and genetic factors in their research, because they are fighting the supremacy of environmentalism (the belief that the environment determines human behavior 100%) both in the social sciences and among the general public. Nobody is surprised to learn that the environment influences behavior; that is not news. But people are often surprised by the extent to which genes influence behavior. That is news.

Two Logical Fallacies That We Must Avoid

In any discussion of evolutionary psychology, or human sciences in general, it is very important to avoid two logical fallacies. They are called the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy.

The naturalistic fallacy, which was coined by the English philosopher George Edward Moore in the early 20th century, though first identified much earlier by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, is the leap from is to ought—that is, the tendency to believe that what is natural is good; that what is, ought to be. For example, one might commit the error of the naturalistic fallacy and say, "Because different groups of people are genetically different and endowed with different innate abilities and talents, they ought to be treated differently."

The moralistic fallacy, coined by the Harvard microbiologist Bernard Davis in the 1970s, is the opposite of the naturalistic fallacy. It refers to the leap from ought to is, the claim that the way things ought to be is the way they are. This is the tendency to believe that what is good is natural; that what ought to be, is. For example, one might commit the error of the moralistic fallacy and say, "Because everybody ought to be treated equally, there are no innate genetic differences between groups of people." The science writer extraordinaire Matt Ridley calls it the reverse naturalistic fallacy.

Both are logical fallacies, and they get in the way of progress in science in general, and in evolutionary psychology in particular. However, as Ridley astutely points out, political conservatives are more likely to commit the naturalistic fallacy ("Nature designed men to be competitive and women to be nurturing, so women ought to stay home to take care of the children and leave business and politics to men."), while political liberals are equally likely to commit the moralistic fallacy ("The Western liberal democratic principles hold that men and women ought to be treated equally under the law, and therefore men and women are biologically identical and any study that demonstrates otherwise is a priori false."). The evolutionary psychologist Robert O. Kurzban concisely captures the common attitude among political liberals when he quips, "It's only `good science' if the message is politically correct."

Since academics, and social scientists in particular, are overwhelmingly left-wing liberals, the moralistic fallacy has been a much greater problem in academic discussions of evolutionary psychology than the naturalistic fallacy. Most academics are above committing the naturalistic fallacy, but they are not above committing the moralistic fallacy. The social scientists' stubborn refusal to accept sex and race differences in behavior, temperament, and cognitive abilities, and their tendency to be blind to the empirical reality of stereotypes, reflect their moralistic fallacy driven by their liberal political convictions.

The left-wing denial of certain inconvenient empirical truths culminates in the wholesale postmodern denial of scientific objectivity and the concept (and possibility) of scientific truth. Conservatives too deny some empirical truths, like evolution, but they do not deny that there is such a thing as a scientific truth. But, once again, we do not have to worry about conservatives in academia, because there are very few of them (and you will find out why in Chapter 5). There are virtually no creationists who deny evolution among the faculties of American universities, but there are many, many postmodernists who deny scientific objectivity.

It is actually very easy to avoid both fallacies—both leaps of logic—by simply never talking about what ought to be at all and only talking about what is. It is not possible to commit either the naturalistic or the moralistic fallacy if scientists never talk about ought. Scientists, by which I mean basic scientists, not applied scientists like engineers and physicians, do not draw moral conclusions and implications from the empirical observations they make, and they are not guided in their observations by moral and political principles. Real scientists—basic scientists—only care about what is, and do not at all care about what ought to be. In this book, I will only talk about what is, and will never talk about what ought to be.

What Does "Natural" Mean?

It is always important in any discussion of science to avoid the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies, but it is particularly important to remember not to be tempted by them when you read this book. From a purely biological perspective, natural only means "that for which the organism is evolutionarily designed" and unnatural only means "that for which the organism is not evolutionarily designed." The only organisms that I will talk about in this book are humans. From a purely scientific perspective, murder and rape are completely natural for humans, and getting a Ph.D. in evolutionary psychology is completely unnatural (which is partly why intelligent people do it!). Natural decidedly does not mean good, valuable, or desirable, and unnatural decidedly does not mean their opposites. One of the consistent themes in this book is that intelligent people often do unnatural things.

There are only two legitimate criteria by which to evaluate scientific ideas and theories: logic and evidence. Accordingly, you may justifiably criticize evolutionary psychological theories (or any other theories in science) if they are logically inconsistent within themselves or if there is credible scientific evidence against them. As a scientist, as the Scientific Fundamentalist, I take all such criticisms seriously. However, you may not criticize scientific theories, whether mine or otherwise, simply because their implications are immoral, ugly, contrary to our ideals, or offensive to some or all. I can tell you right now that the implications of many of the scientific ideas and theories discussed in this book, whether mine or otherwise, are indeed immoral, ugly, contrary to our ideals, or offensive to some group of people. They are very offensive to me. But it doesn't matter.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Intelligence Paradoxby Satoshi Kanazawa Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Trade Paper Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0470586958
• ISBN 13: 9780470586952
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile