Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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.

Aus dem Klappentext

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

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

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...