Which is stupid and not what the article says the study is claiming or has found

its just silly how everyone jumps on anything tangentially critical of christianity so they can add their two cents, regardless of how silly they are. everyone thinks that what they have to add is so profound it will clearly change the opinion of every person who reads it. each one of you who does it is like that annoying kid in class that always has to make a comment because they think they are the smartest one in the room, when really its just that no one cares.

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 4:46 PM. Reason : .]

2/3/2011 4:44:23 PM

If you don't care so much why do you keep posting?

You're absolutely right in that that the fact that the Bible is a whacked out piece of shit should be common knowledge but even though you are enlightened and know this already our lives are impacted by people who take it seriously

You coming in here and thumping your chest that we know nothing about how actual Christians interpret the Bible doesn't change this fact in any way.

Beyond that a discussion board seems like the appropriate place to have a discussion, but that's just me.

^^I think what the OP meant to say with his title was
"If you don't believe in God, it is likely that you are smarter."

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 4:59 PM. Reason : .]

2/3/2011 4:56:47 PM

from his thread title execution, i'm guessing that he believes in god

2/3/2011 5:09:53 PM

^ LOL, thats the first thing i thought too.

..also, definitions of "God" vary. what i believed when I was an arrogant 17 year old still holds water, but my definition of what is divine has evolved.

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 5:13 PM. Reason : ]

2/3/2011 5:11:46 PM

This thread is great you guys. Really, I could only make one small improvement on it...while you're saying poorly-worded, ill-informed, logically-unsound things, why not have someone point out that this study also demonstrates that intelligence neuters men and turns women into whores?

Quote :

"for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence"

2/3/2011 5:21:04 PM

no actually it said women are always whores, regardless of intelligence

just kidding, of course that's not what it says. go read it again buddy.

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 6:30 PM. Reason : asfasdfsdaf]

2/3/2011 6:23:58 PM

Quote :

"C'mon guy. Flat Earth theology was rampant up until about the time we figured out that the world was spherical and even then the Bible was used to fight it."

only, it really wasn't. We figured out the earth was round before the New Testament, dude. The Bible was never used to suggest the Earth was flat, except by people who want to distort history. It's funny that you, in trying to show lies in the Bible, propagate your own.

2/3/2011 6:32:05 PM

Everyone take note: burro is right regarding the prevalence of Flat Earth theology. Evidence suggests most people figured it out at least by 1000AD. On this point, I was wrong.

2/3/2011 7:05:44 PM

dude, the fucking ancient Greeks knew the earth was round.

2/3/2011 9:46:23 PM

That doesn't mean people in the middle ages thought the earth was spherical.

A significant amount of Americans today think the earth is only a few thousand years old.

Judging by the Cisco commercial, there's tons of people in Africa who don't know the earth is a sphere.

2/3/2011 9:53:14 PM

fantastic logical progression

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 10:02 PM. Reason : .]

2/3/2011 10:01:41 PM

FWIW, I am baptized Agnostic.

Study does not lie. What you read is what you get. The only way to argue against it is to see what was the representative sample size.

I am assuming all the "very religious" people read the Bible quite often and spend a lot of time in church discussing the same topics over and over and over again. It isn't exactly the most neuron-enriching activity. People who are not religious, arguably, spend more time researching and studying different topics, whether it is science or social studies. Of course they will be sharper and better prepared for IQ test.

2/3/2011 11:09:42 PM

just admit that you misrepresented the study (or didn't understand the conclusions?) in order to make a broader point about religion so you can stop looking like a fool

in the event that you didn't understand it, let me help you

Quote :

"Abstract The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values (for children, marriage, family, and friends). The analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Study 1) and the General Social Surveys (Study 2) show that adolescent and adult intelligence significantly increases adult liberalism, atheism, and men’s (but not women’s) value on sexual exclusivity."

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 11:28 PM. Reason : and also: haha, what a retarded assumption]

2/3/2011 11:25:32 PM

From the article:

Quote :

"Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence."

Sounds pretty conclusive to me. But, then again at 21 there was a lot of stuff I didn't understand either.

2/3/2011 11:37:46 PM

Oh, I didn't mean that NOONE in history thought that the world was flat. At some point in history nearly every civilization did, but one by one they figured it out. There were (and still are, though at the fringe) Christian organizations taking a literal interpretation of many passages of the Bible, but it's not as rampant as I once thought.

All of this is beside the point: Christianity and accurate geology and cosmology have always been at odds. A literal interpretation of Genesis cannot be reconciled with the facts.

Quote :

"just admit that you misrepresented the study (or didn't understand the conclusions?) in order to make a broader point about religion so you can stop looking like a fool"

I'm not sure how even the passage you quoted indicates a misrepresentation of the study. Even that passage states that higher IQ = higher chance of atheism.

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 11:59 PM. Reason : .]

2/3/2011 11:57:11 PM

^^i made up an age, and if you didn't and are actually 32 and are having trouble understanding this you should really ask the university for some money back

there is no causal relationship stating anything that you want it to. the study offers a few ideas, even makes some conjectures citing a few popular theories, and they are pretty far from the point you are trying to make

you also keep trying to define a belief in god as meaning christian, and assumed that the very religious people read the bible often. i'm curious how often the jewish students surveyed read the bible? do the students in the "other" category spend a lot of time in church?

[Edited on February 4, 2011 at 12:07 AM. Reason : its pretty obvious you haven't even glanced at the study, and only know whats in the article]

2/4/2011 12:06:05 AM

I don't "want" the data to show anything. Study after study has shown a negative correlation (no one in here is claiming a causal relationship besides you, btw) between religiosity and intelligence. I'm not even sure this is arguable at this point. You're getting hung up on the wording of the thread title I think.

2/4/2011 9:11:20 AM

^^

Quote :

" there is no causal relationship stating anything that you want it to. the study offers a few ideas, even makes some conjectures citing a few popular theories, and they are pretty far from the point you are trying to make"

That does not make any sense?

Quote :

" you also keep trying to define a belief in god as meaning christian, and assumed that the very religious people read the bible often. i'm curious how often the jewish students surveyed read the bible? do the students in the "other" category spend a lot of time in church?"

Sure, it is an assumption, albeit a decently good one. I can tell you that if they don’t spend time reading the Bible they certainly aren’t dwelling on quantum mechanics principles in their free time.

Btw, abstract is not conclusion. If you are in college you should know the template of a typical journal article. Roughly....Abstract/intro/discussion/result/conclusion/references.

I just picked on Christians, but could have picked any other religion for that matter. All organized religions are equally illogical.

2/4/2011 9:51:30 AM

You haven't even looked at the study and you are criticizing me for only posting the abstract? Seriously? Do you even know what an abstract contains?

Fine though, here you go:

Quote :

"Conclusion The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the logical conjunction of the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values, such as liberalism, atheism, and, for men, sexual exclusivity, than less intelligent individuals, while general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values. Data from two large representative samples, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the General Social Surveys, support the predictions (although some of the standardized coefficients, while highly statistically significant, are relatively small in size). Both adolescent and adult intelligence predict adult espousal of liberalism, atheism, and sexual exclusivity for men (but not for women), while intelligence is not associated with the adult espousal of evolutionarily familiar values on children, marriage, family, and friends. Given the high heritability of intelligence (Jensen 1998:169-202), and the moderate heritability of political attitudes (Alford et al. 2005; Eaves and Eysenck 1974) and religiosity (Bouchard et al. 1999; Koenig et al. 2005), one alternative explanation for the effect of adolescent intelligence on adult political ideology and religiosity is the genetic transmission of all three traits. Intelligent parents beget intelligent children; liberal parents beget liberal children; religious parents beget religious children. Such behavior genetic explanations, while undoubtedly true, cannot explain the origin of covariance between general intelligence and certain values. Why do intelligent parents tend simultaneously to be liberal and atheist, to pass on their genetic tendencies toward liberalism and atheism to their intelligent children? Why are there not an equal (or greater) number of intelligent parents who are conservative and/or religious, to pass on their conservative and religious tendencies to their intelligent children? Why are there not many less intelligent parents who are liberal and atheist? Further, behavior genetics cannot explain why the value on sexual exclusivity (if heritable) is transmitted only to sons but not to daughters. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis can offer one possible explanation for the coexistence of general intelligence and certain values. Another alternative hypothesis is that more intelligent individuals are more likely not necessarily to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values, as the Hypothesis predicts, but not to conform to others in the society (Millet and Dewitte 2007). It may be adaptive for the survival of humans to adopt the rule “The less intelligent you are relative to those around you, the more you should mimic their beliefs and actions.” Because the majority, under most reasonable conditions, is always mathematically more likely to be correct than the average individual (as the Condorcet Jury Theorem holds), such a decision rule may save the lives of individuals of less than average intelligence. It is a bit difficult to separate this alternative hypothesis from the prediction of the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis because many of the current beliefs in our society, derived as they are from evolved human nature, are evolutionarily familiar. However, the alternative hypothesis should lead to the prediction that, because contemporary American society is predominantly monogamous, more intelligent individuals should prefer polygyny. As the results presented above show, however, this is not the case; more intelligent men are more likely to prefer monogamy and sexual exclusivity. Further, both in the relatively more conservative capitalist United States and in the relatively more liberal socialist United Kingdom, more intelligent individuals are more likely to be liberal than less intelligent individuals (Deary et al. 2008a, b). So it appears that it is not the predominant values of society that affect the values of more or less intelligent individuals, but their evolutionary novelty. While it may be reasonable to posit that liberalism, atheism, and sexual exclusivity for men may be evolutionarily novel values, they are far from the only ones. For example, while the contemporary American definition of left-wing liberalism may be the polar opposite of genetic self-interestedness, nepotism, reciprocal altruism, and ethnocentrism of our ancestors, there are other political values that deviate from them, such as communism, monarchism, and libertarianism, to name just a few. Future research would have to examine whether more intelligent individuals are also more likely to adopt these evolutionarily novel political ideologies. What other values are evolutionarily novel? Another such value is vegetarianism. Humans are naturally omnivorous, and anyone who eschewed animal protein and ate only vegetables in the ancestral environment, in the face of food scarcity and precariousness of its supply, was not likely to have survived long and stayed healthy enough to have become our ancestors. Vegetarianism would therefore be an evolutionarily novel value, and the Hypothesis would predict more intelligent individuals are more likely to choose to be a vegetarian than less intelligent individuals. Consistent with this prediction, Gale et al. (2007) find in their analysis of the 1970 British Cohort Study that, net of sex, social class, and education, childhood intelligence at age 10 significantly increases the probability that individuals become vegetarian as adults at age 30. In the Add Health Data, adolescent intelligence (in junior high and high school) significantly (p < .05) increases the likelihood of vegetarianism in early adulthood, net of age, sex, race, education, and earnings. However, once I control for religion, the effect of adolescent intelligence becomes only marginally significant (p < .07). (Results available upon request.) The current work must be extended into several directions in the future. First, the Hypothesis must be tested against other competing theories of the origin of values and preferences. Second, future empirical work must consider other evolutionarily novel and familiar values besides the ones considered and tested in this paper. For example, in addition to vegetarianism referred to above, the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to espouse such other evolutionarily novel values as pacifism (for men), feminism, or environmentalism. Third, future empirical work must be carried out with samples from nations other than the United States, such as Gale et al.’s (2007) paper discussed above, which uses a large British sample to test the effect of childhood intelligence on the acquisition of vegetarianism. The origin of values and preferences remains a very important theoretical puzzle for social and behavioral sciences, and the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and intelligence research, provides one deductive explanation from theoretical first principles for why individuals have certain values and preferences. By explaining how general intelligence may interact with the evolutionary constraints of the human brain, the Hypothesis can account for the effect of intelligence on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily novel values. Because the list of such evolutionarily novel values is potentially very long, the Hypothesis promises to provide a theoretical explanation for why intelligent individuals acquire preferences and values in many different domains of life."

2/4/2011 10:40:50 AM

^ Can't wait for the "You are smarter if you don't eat meat" thread

2/4/2011 10:44:13 AM

Well, one of the main points of the first study was that intelligence correlates with things that are "evolutionarily novel."

Vegetarianism and veganism are evolutionarily novel. That's the exact reason I oppose them.

2/4/2011 10:56:10 AM

I'm not sure why you would oppose behaviors specifically because they are "evolutionarily novel". Evolution has gotten us here but we need not align ourselves with behaviors that would have made survival and reproduction more likely in a world 200,000 years ago.

2/4/2011 11:20:45 AM

Quote :

"You haven't even looked at the study and you are criticizing me for only posting the abstract? Seriously? Do you even know what an abstract contains? Fine though, here you go: "

No, n00b. Here you go:

http://www.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/spq/Mar10SPQFeature.pdf

Are you blind?

AGAIN, from the article:

Quote :

"The mean adolescent intelligence of young adults who identify themselves as ‘‘very liberal’’ is 106.42, while that of those who identify themselves as ‘‘very conservative’’ is 94.82. The differences in mean adolescent intelligence by adult political ideology is highly statistically significant (F(4, 13053) 5 83.6327, p\.00001"

2/4/2011 11:29:39 AM

That says more about political labels (and, specifically, how they're interpreted by people being surveyed) than anything else.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that vegetarians and vegans are, on average, more intelligent. If you can recognize that animals do feel pain (most meat eaters are the same ones decrying animal abuse when there's a cat or dog involved), and you're a compassionate person, you should want to reduce or eliminate that suffering. Compartmentalization plays a role here, as it does in religion. While many people may understand the process by which they receive their meat, out of sight is out of mind.

2/4/2011 12:08:05 PM

Quote :

"I'm not sure why you would oppose behaviors specifically because they are "evolutionarily novel"."

In cases where technology can intervene and make some behaviors unnecessary, sure, it doesn't matter. We still have to eat, however, and I'm afraid we 're adapted to eat certain things and not adapted to eat other things. There's no technology that allows you circumvent these adaptations.

2/4/2011 12:13:25 PM

Quote :

"I'm afraid we 're adapted to eat certain things and not adapted to eat other things. There's no technology that allows you circumvent these adaptations."

Vegetarian diets are perfectly healthy when done right.

2/4/2011 12:21:42 PM

Quote :

"I wouldn't be surprised to learn that vegetarians and vegans are, on average, more intelligent. If you can recognize that animals do feel pain (most meat eaters are the same ones decrying animal abuse when there's a cat or dog involved), and you're a compassionate person, you should want to reduce or eliminate that suffering. Compartmentalization plays a role here, as it does in religion. While many people may understand the process by which they receive their meat, out of sight is out of mind."

The last few weeks I've been struggling with this mentally actually. I'm reaching the conclusion that I'll just be evil and devour tasty animals that suffered to make it to my plate. But man that's totally another discussion.

Quote :

"I'm afraid we 're adapted to eat certain things and not adapted to eat other things. There's no technology that allows you circumvent these adaptations."

I think we've adapted to have a very robust and versatile digestion system. The amount of different diets eaten by people all over the world successfully is proof of that.

2/4/2011 12:24:08 PM

^Because you don't feel compassion for the animals? At least thats exclusive of intelligence.

Are you guys gonna let EuroTitToss get away with claiming to oppose "evolutionarily novel" behaviors? Surely there's some hypocrisy to be uncovered

2/4/2011 12:28:14 PM

My compassion for their suffering is being outweighed by my desire to eat their tasty flesh: hence the evil.

Edit: I thought i *did* call him out.

[Edited on February 4, 2011 at 12:47 PM. Reason : .]

2/4/2011 12:38:25 PM

10^9, here is your problem. When you say stuff like this:

Quote :

"I am assuming all the "very religious" people read the Bible quite often and spend a lot of time in church discussing the same topics over and over and over again. It isn't exactly the most neuron-enriching activity. People who are not religious, arguably, spend more time researching and studying different topics, whether it is science or social studies. Of course they will be sharper and better prepared for IQ test."

it is evident you are trying to attach a conclusion to the study that is no present. the study does not say that anything about being religious makes people less smart (as you are claiming), but that more intelligent people have a preference towards new ideas and are thus more likely to not be religious. you are correctly understanding the finding of the survey (that religious people are not as intelligent on average) but you are failing to understand the actual conclusion of the study. they never make any claims, assertions, or conclusions that religion makes people less intelligent.

see the difference? i hope the noobness doesn't stick to your chin too badly, i'll get you a wet washcloth.

2/4/2011 1:00:21 PM

Quote :

"Are you guys gonna let EuroTitToss get away with claiming to oppose "evolutionarily novel" behaviors? Surely there's some hypocrisy to be uncovered"

Just ones that affect your health. And even then there's a cost benefit analysis.

2/4/2011 1:25:45 PM