ahh, yeah....

Are liberals smarter than conservatives?

By COLIN HORGAN


A story making the rounds in the last few days has a fairly contentious assertion: that liberal-minded people have higher levels of intelligence than those who identify as being conservative. It’s not an entirely new suggestion, but this time, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics has tried to tie the theory to evolution.
He posits that, “We are designed to care only about people we associate with.” In other words, we have a kind of default setting that, at a base level, makes us associate with family and friends, or those in our immediate community. Fair enough. It continues:The ability to think and reason, he says, evolved to deal with occasional but serious problems such as fires caused by lighting strikes, flash floods or severe droughts that threatened starvation. He terms these phenomena as evolutionarily novel.

As time passed, more of the elements of our lives fell into the “evolutionary novel” category, Kanazawa says. People who are more intelligent, he argues, are better able to consider these novel elements and decide, for example, that liberalism, atheism or monogamy are things they want to subscribe to.

Liberalism, caring about millions of total strangers and giving up money to make sure that those strangers will do well, is evolutionarily novel,” Kanazawa says