On Partying, Or Solving Evolutionarily Novel Problems
Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, 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, is interviewed over at The Economist about the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of being smart:
Humans appear to be designed to be paranoid; they are designed to see intentional agents behind natural phenomena. This is because making the mistake of thinking that a natural event has an intentional agent behind it is less potentially costly than being oblivious and thinking that an intentional event, like someone trying to kill you, has a coincidental cause. The paranoid outlive the oblivious. Belief in God may be a consequence of this tendency.
And then Dr. Kanazawa really breaks it down:
Intelligent people are more likely to be nocturnal because humans are designed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down. They are more likely to be homosexual, because humans are evolutionarily designed to reproduce heterosexually. They are more likely to enjoy instrumental music because music in its evolutionary origin was vocal, and they are more likely to consume alcohol, cigarettes and drugs because all of these substances are evolutionarily novel.
Intelligent people are more likely to be homosexuals who stay up all night listening to innocuous, impersonal techno music while drinking and doing drugs? Well, OK then Doctor. Happy Pride!
