One of my favorite topics is Sociobiology. So favorite, that I got an honors degree in it. Along the same vain as this is Evolutionary Psychology. I've always had an academic interest in parts of psychology, although it can be a bit fluffy at times, and as my friend Joe once said "Be wary of any Psychology majors, everyone that's in Psychology is there to self diagnose." Taking this cynical (but believable) viewpoint hasn't stopped me from learning about psychology, and I was very interested to find out about a Psychologist called Kanazawa, inventor of the Savanna Principle and Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis, related to the field of study of general intelligence (g).
I started reading about him in
this article with the provocative title "Smart People Do More Drugs -- Because of Evolution". The article overviews his theories, along with his most recent conclusion, that smarter people do more drugs because many of them are novel evolutionarily speaking. This is just one application of his Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis.
The Savanna Principle states that the environment that our ancestors participated in and which our brains developed and evolved around is very different from the environment we live in today. Kanazawa's example is how we perceive the color of a banana, which looks banana color under any level of natural lighting (sun or moon, day or night) but does not look the same under man made sodium vapor lights, because of how new they are evolutionarily speaking.
He goes on to apply the theory of General Intelligence to his explanation of the difference between our present day cognitive capacity and how it could have evolved from our ancestors. Much of our brain's evolution took place during the Pleistocene Epoch (~10,000 years ago), and was an incredibly stable time period for humans, where most were hunter-gatherers on the African savanna their whole loves over many many generations. Although most problems could be solved by genetic hard wiring and did not require a lot of conscious thought (hunger, finding mates, living within a social group), novel problems did occur that required improvisation and abstract thought. A good example he gives is a lightning strike, which people would rarely have to deal with since lightning never strikes the same place twice. They would have to figure out how to escape or stop the spread of fire, and make decisions whether they would have to move or rebuild where they were.
The problem solving skill that could be applied to novel problems, is referred to as General Intelligence and evolved out of the necessity to deal with infrequent but life threatening problems. This had to have happened regularly enough to be selected for, and was first postulated by Charles Spearman. He stated that variations in intelligence test scores could be explained by two factors:
1) Individual ability making a person skilled at a task
2) A general factor that governs performance on all cognitive tasks
General Intelligence is now more important in our current environment than ever, because everything is now evolutionarily novel and cannot be as easily dealt with by instinct.
The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis states that: less intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel situations, and more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel preferences and values. As one example, Polygyny (a man with more than one female partner) would be evolutionarily familiar since it was more common in the past, but monogamy is relatively new evolutionarily. Evidence Kanazawa has collected indicates men with a higher IQ are more likely to value monogamy than those that scored lower. Using this llogic, he also theorizes that people with higher IQ prefer:
-Liberalism to conservatism
-Being awake at night (night owls) instead of being awake during daylight
-Vegetarianism
-Disinterest in evolutionarily familiar crimes such as theft and physical assault
I've read most (maybe all) of Kanazawa's papers, and there is a lot of repetition. Maybe most scientists do this, but it seemed particularly apparent, and I've read a few papers. He has a lot of supporting study data to back up his claims, but people in the fields related to sociobiology need to tread carefully. The science as a whole was virtually quashed out when Arthur Jenson suggested that there was a genetic correlation between race and intelligence. I couldn't help but thinking of this while reading Kanazawa's papers, and definitely if nothing else smacks of some personal bias by his position taken in how he analyzes the data.
The only real argument I have is with the idea that intelligent people always prefer liberalism to conservatism. Politics being much more complicated than black and white, we also see many intelligent people in political control of conservative party. If the conservatives were less intelligent, would they not be less fit to govern and manage government services and obligations, and also less able to compete with liberal parties during election times? There is also the issue of social and economic conservatism as two different aspects within the umbrella of political alignment and were not considered in his analysis. Like many scientists before him, he seems to be drawing grandiose sweeping conclusions with only bits of isolated data.
