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The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One
A book that challenges common misconceptions about the nature of intelligence Satoshi Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (written with Alan S. Miller) was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a rollicking bit of pop science that turns the lens of evolutionary psychology on issues of the day." That book answered such burning questions as why women tend to lust after males who already have mates and why newborns look more like Dad than Mom. Now Kanazawa tackles the nature of what it is, what it does, what it is good for (if anything). Highly entertaining, smart (dare we say intelligent?), and daringly contrarian, The Intelligence Paradox will provide a deeper understanding of what intelligence is, and what it means for us in our lives. Challenging common misconceptions about the nature of intelligence, this book offers surprising insights into the cutting-edge of science at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and intelligence research.
292 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 22, 2012
75 people are currently reading
1131 people want to read
About the author
Satoshi Kanazawa
16 books47 followersSatoshi Kanazawa is a Reader in Management at the London School of Economics. His work uses evolutionary psychology to analyse social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
September 25, 2019
Ya ever meet someone who’s smart enough to sound like they know what they’re talking about, but then ten minutes into the conversation they’re like, “and that’s why I KNOW we didn’t land on the moon”?
That experience became a book.
That experience became a book.
November 10, 2019
This book doesn’t begin badly. The author claims he is only interested in the most scientific of truths, and he will be able to back everything up with science. Good, right? Well, it sounds quite interesting in the beginning.
Then slowly, but surely the whole thing seems to spin out of control, and ends up in a lot of circular logic, and sometimes just odd conclusions. So, I have to admit that this book left me quite unconvinced of what the author is trying to prove with it.
There is the occasional interesting idea in this, but they are too few and far between for me to try to go through this again.
Then slowly, but surely the whole thing seems to spin out of control, and ends up in a lot of circular logic, and sometimes just odd conclusions. So, I have to admit that this book left me quite unconvinced of what the author is trying to prove with it.
There is the occasional interesting idea in this, but they are too few and far between for me to try to go through this again.
February 1, 2020
Hokay done with this thing. I can't recommend it. There are better books on evolutionary psychology out there. Here's a good list:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...
Evolutionary psychology is a relatively young discipline, and Kanazawa spends an awful lot of time selling his discipline with some obvious rhetoric and more than a few shady analogies. IQ tests, for instance, are not as unbiased and irrefutable as your bathroom scale. And Raven's Progressive Matrices test is not the absolute gold standard of unbiased mental acuity that he repetitively insists it is.
Further, Kanazawa's use of language is deeply problematic. Personally, I find the use of words like "design" when describing evolution to be more than a little shaky, and portray a real lack of basic understanding of how language—or Evolution—work. However, in this case the author dives right off the short pier of semantics and vocabulary using such ill-defined words and terms as "stupid" and "common sense" with little or no objective sense of them in either the real world or psychology, and his repeated assurance that he doesn't mean any of these terms in anything more than a scientific and objective way falls completely flat. "If liberals are so intelligent, why do they say such dumb things?" is an actual topic in this text, and the conclusions are writ right into the assumptions of the question. The truth is: they don't. Not any more than anyone else does, and probably quite a bit less. But the assumption is that they must because why else would it be a standard idea expressed through what can only be the lockstep laws of evolutionary theory? The possibility or even the probability that intelligent people say things that are simply beyond the ken of their less intelligent listeners (among whom we must, lamentably, include Mr. Kanazawa) or that are recontextualized, misrepresented or simply misunderstood by those listeners in order to make them appear to lack common sense is something that eludes Kanazawa in favor of the quick, reductive and fallacious conclusion. A not uncommon problem in his discipline, BTW.... Some evolutionary psychologists engage in a lot of post hoc rationalizations of contemporary cultural byproducts by connecting them up to our evolutionary past on the savanna. That there is no scientific verification that these things even exist let alone have a connection to the vast expanse of evolution seems to trouble them not at all.
When presenting the macro ideas of evolutionary psychology, Kanazawa does a good job, but like his discipline itself, when it gets down to actually explaining culture and individual attitudes things begin to fall apart rapidly, and the author's personal agenda and biases—despite repeated, almost Freudian levels of denial and rationalization—rear their ugly heads. Effectively, that turns this text into more of a personal exploration of his own idiosyncratic and haphazard interpretation of evolutionary psychology than a legit presentation of it. As such it may very well be something the author felt compelled to write; it's not anything anyone should feel compelled to read.
1.5 stars is about right for this kind of thing. I'm rounding up for the sake of simple math and the limitations of the GR rating system, and a generosity toward the effort that Kanazawa made—even if that is a kind of generosity that he himself dedicated an entire text to expressly and explicitly denying everyone else....
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...
Evolutionary psychology is a relatively young discipline, and Kanazawa spends an awful lot of time selling his discipline with some obvious rhetoric and more than a few shady analogies. IQ tests, for instance, are not as unbiased and irrefutable as your bathroom scale. And Raven's Progressive Matrices test is not the absolute gold standard of unbiased mental acuity that he repetitively insists it is.
Further, Kanazawa's use of language is deeply problematic. Personally, I find the use of words like "design" when describing evolution to be more than a little shaky, and portray a real lack of basic understanding of how language—or Evolution—work. However, in this case the author dives right off the short pier of semantics and vocabulary using such ill-defined words and terms as "stupid" and "common sense" with little or no objective sense of them in either the real world or psychology, and his repeated assurance that he doesn't mean any of these terms in anything more than a scientific and objective way falls completely flat. "If liberals are so intelligent, why do they say such dumb things?" is an actual topic in this text, and the conclusions are writ right into the assumptions of the question. The truth is: they don't. Not any more than anyone else does, and probably quite a bit less. But the assumption is that they must because why else would it be a standard idea expressed through what can only be the lockstep laws of evolutionary theory? The possibility or even the probability that intelligent people say things that are simply beyond the ken of their less intelligent listeners (among whom we must, lamentably, include Mr. Kanazawa) or that are recontextualized, misrepresented or simply misunderstood by those listeners in order to make them appear to lack common sense is something that eludes Kanazawa in favor of the quick, reductive and fallacious conclusion. A not uncommon problem in his discipline, BTW.... Some evolutionary psychologists engage in a lot of post hoc rationalizations of contemporary cultural byproducts by connecting them up to our evolutionary past on the savanna. That there is no scientific verification that these things even exist let alone have a connection to the vast expanse of evolution seems to trouble them not at all.
When presenting the macro ideas of evolutionary psychology, Kanazawa does a good job, but like his discipline itself, when it gets down to actually explaining culture and individual attitudes things begin to fall apart rapidly, and the author's personal agenda and biases—despite repeated, almost Freudian levels of denial and rationalization—rear their ugly heads. Effectively, that turns this text into more of a personal exploration of his own idiosyncratic and haphazard interpretation of evolutionary psychology than a legit presentation of it. As such it may very well be something the author felt compelled to write; it's not anything anyone should feel compelled to read.
1.5 stars is about right for this kind of thing. I'm rounding up for the sake of simple math and the limitations of the GR rating system, and a generosity toward the effort that Kanazawa made—even if that is a kind of generosity that he himself dedicated an entire text to expressly and explicitly denying everyone else....
February 27, 2015
“Yet, whatever else, to be a clever silly is a somewhat tragic state; because it entails being cognitively-trapped by compulsive abstraction; unable to engage directly and spontaneously with what most humans have traditionally regarded as psycho-social reality; disbarred from the common experience of humankind and instead cut-adrift on the surface of a glittering but shallow ocean of novelties: none of which can ever truly convince or satisfy. It is to be alienated from the world; and to find no stable meaning of life that is solidly underpinned by emotional conviction.” – Bruce Charlton, “Clever Sillies: Why the high IQ lack common sense.”
The Intelligence Paradox helps explain the unusual thoughts and behaviors exhibited by myself as well as many peers. Kanazawa refocuses attention on how intelligence is often improperly considered a signifier of human worth. IQ merely measures the relative comprehension of evolutionarily novel circumstances by individuals and groups – nothing more, nothing less. Higher IQ makes people better able to depart from the beaten path, for good or ill. While I might occasionally quibble with Kanazawa’s assertions, the conclusions from his IQ-novelty hypothesis generally hold empirical weight, as do his insightful rationales for why these discrepancies between intelligent and normal people occur.
While intelligence is critical for material success in cognitively complex modern societies, Kanazawa’s Savanna Principle provides a guide for the genetically fortunate to also regain their humility and humanity, each prerequisites for true happiness. Recuperating one’s common sense and ability to connect with an innate orientation toward the concrete and interpersonal brings multifaceted dividends. As Kanazawa poignantly asks in the final pages: “If you had a choice, would your rather be a good brain surgeon, or a good parent? Would you rather be a good corporate executive, or a good friend?”
The Intelligence Paradox helps explain the unusual thoughts and behaviors exhibited by myself as well as many peers. Kanazawa refocuses attention on how intelligence is often improperly considered a signifier of human worth. IQ merely measures the relative comprehension of evolutionarily novel circumstances by individuals and groups – nothing more, nothing less. Higher IQ makes people better able to depart from the beaten path, for good or ill. While I might occasionally quibble with Kanazawa’s assertions, the conclusions from his IQ-novelty hypothesis generally hold empirical weight, as do his insightful rationales for why these discrepancies between intelligent and normal people occur.
While intelligence is critical for material success in cognitively complex modern societies, Kanazawa’s Savanna Principle provides a guide for the genetically fortunate to also regain their humility and humanity, each prerequisites for true happiness. Recuperating one’s common sense and ability to connect with an innate orientation toward the concrete and interpersonal brings multifaceted dividends. As Kanazawa poignantly asks in the final pages: “If you had a choice, would your rather be a good brain surgeon, or a good parent? Would you rather be a good corporate executive, or a good friend?”
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August 3, 2021So this is what a pseudoscience book feels like.
Don't even try to make sense of all the nonsense and oversimplification in this book.
However, here is a recipe for writing such a book
1. Take a scientific fact or law and give it a new personal name.... "I prefer to call it the Savannah Principle," which has even the slightest connection to the original theory, but sounds cool to non-scientists
2. Avoid using the words: research, university, professor. Instead, use the word studies without mentioning where they were published and under what circumstances they were produced.
3. Try to confuse people not only about the everyday terms, but also about their minds by calling your own wrong reasoning a paradox: "People who are intelligent do stupid things, so they are stupid, and that's a paradox."
4. Prove your idea with millions of the same examples from every corner of everyday life that sound cool: TV, porn, drugs, etc. Do this so obsessively that it becomes too much even for you at times. But beware, don't call it by its right name - I don't know - but, new material for future study. And finally,
5. suggest the most absurd conclusions that have nothing to do with the book so far. This makes everything better than any Agatha Christie book.
Good luck.
Don't even try to make sense of all the nonsense and oversimplification in this book.
However, here is a recipe for writing such a book
1. Take a scientific fact or law and give it a new personal name.... "I prefer to call it the Savannah Principle," which has even the slightest connection to the original theory, but sounds cool to non-scientists
2. Avoid using the words: research, university, professor. Instead, use the word studies without mentioning where they were published and under what circumstances they were produced.
3. Try to confuse people not only about the everyday terms, but also about their minds by calling your own wrong reasoning a paradox: "People who are intelligent do stupid things, so they are stupid, and that's a paradox."
4. Prove your idea with millions of the same examples from every corner of everyday life that sound cool: TV, porn, drugs, etc. Do this so obsessively that it becomes too much even for you at times. But beware, don't call it by its right name - I don't know - but, new material for future study. And finally,
5. suggest the most absurd conclusions that have nothing to do with the book so far. This makes everything better than any Agatha Christie book.
Good luck.
May 1, 2023
It's a decent compilation of evolutionary facts that the author tries to explain with the theory of the "intelligence paradox" where high IQ people act in evolutionary novel terms.
I knew most of these facts and interpretations, and they are uncontested amongst people familiar with evolutionary explanations of human behavior.
But this book could have been shorter, even 5 pages in the form of a condensed scientific review could have been enough.
Also, he lost me in a few sections and in the last chapter where he tried to apply his theory to political systems...
For more, see the excerpts I shared during reading:
"How polygynous members of a species are in general correlates with the extent of sexual dimorphism in size (the average size difference between the male and the female). The more sexually dimorphic the species (where the males are bigger than the females), the more polygynous the species."
"This is either because males of polygynous species become larger in order to compete with other males and monopolize females,4 or because females of polygynous species become smaller in order to mature early and start mating.5 Sexual selection can also create sexual dimorphism in size, if women prefer taller men as mates and/or if men prefer shorter women as mates."
"... what is indisputable is the positive association between the degree of polygyny and the degree of sexual dimorphism in size, both across species and across human societies. Thus strictly monogamous gibbons are sexually monomorphic (males and females are about the same size), whereas highly polygynous gorillas are equally highly sexually dimorphic in size."
"the average human male is only 17% heavier than the average human female.10 So, on this scale, humans are mildly polygynous, not as polygynous as gorillas (let alone southern elephant seals), but not strictly monogamous like gibbons either."
"a major determinant of the level of polygyny in society [is] income inequality. The more unequal the income distribution, the more polygynous the society...it makes more economic sense for women to share a wealthy man than to monopolize a poor man. In the words of George Bernard Shaw “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one.”"
"much of what we now call interpersonal crime today, such as murder, assault, robbery, and theft, were probably routine means of competition among men for resources and mates. This is how men likely competed for resources and mating opportunities for much of human evolutionary history."
"Less intelligent individuals are significantly more likely to want to become parents, and more intelligent individuals are significantly more likely to want to remain voluntarily childless."
"Among women, childhood general intelligence significantly decreases the number of children they have had in their lifetimes. Among men, it does not. While the effect of childhood general intelligence on women's fertility is consistent with the prediction of the Intelligence Paradox, the lack of the same effect among men is inconsistent with it."
"It is not clear to me why more intelligent men, who wanted fewer children than less intelligent men at the start of their reproductive careers, do not actually have fewer children. This is in sharp contrast to more intelligent women who wanted fewer children and in fact do have fewer children than less intelligent women."
"[Is a demanding career a factor? ] But this is not the case. Only childhood intelligence, not educational achievement or earnings, decreases the number of children women have. Contrary to popular belief, more educated women and women with more demanding careers do not have fewer children and are not more likely to remain childless."
"Another possibility is that women find intelligent men more attractive as mates. The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller has consistently argued that women preferentially select men with higher levels of intelligence to mate with.
[My note: Lack of more intelligent men for these intelligent women, who as a consequence can't fulfil their hypergamy in regard to intelligence]"
"Among both men and women, number of siblings significantly increases the number of children. Since the number of siblings (plus one) is the same as the number of children that their parents had, this means that fertility—the total number of children individuals have—is highly heritable. The more children your parents have had (and hence the more siblings you have), the more children you have yourself."
"Genes determine about 80% of the variance in adult [general] intelligence. On average, more intelligent parents beget more intelligent children. And the genes that influence general intelligence are thought to be located on the X chromosomes. ... It means that boys inherit their general intelligence from their mothers only, while girls inherit their general intelligence from both their mothers and their fathers."
"So women influence the general intelligence of future generations very strongly, through their sons and through their paternal granddaughters. If more intelligent women have fewer children and are more likely to remain childless, then one potential consequence is that the average level of general intelligence in society may decline over time."
"the Lynn-Flynn effect, during the 20th century ... secular rise in IQ due to better infant and child nutrition and health. ... This effect is already halted in advanced industrial nations."
"There is strong evidence to suggest that the Lynn-Flynn Effect was only a 20th-century phenomenon. It appears to have ended at the end of the 20th century in the most advanced industrial nations. Studies suggest that the average level of intelligence has begun to decline at the beginning of the 21st century in such advanced industrial nations as Australia, Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom."
I knew most of these facts and interpretations, and they are uncontested amongst people familiar with evolutionary explanations of human behavior.
But this book could have been shorter, even 5 pages in the form of a condensed scientific review could have been enough.
Also, he lost me in a few sections and in the last chapter where he tried to apply his theory to political systems...
For more, see the excerpts I shared during reading:
"How polygynous members of a species are in general correlates with the extent of sexual dimorphism in size (the average size difference between the male and the female). The more sexually dimorphic the species (where the males are bigger than the females), the more polygynous the species."
"This is either because males of polygynous species become larger in order to compete with other males and monopolize females,4 or because females of polygynous species become smaller in order to mature early and start mating.5 Sexual selection can also create sexual dimorphism in size, if women prefer taller men as mates and/or if men prefer shorter women as mates."
"... what is indisputable is the positive association between the degree of polygyny and the degree of sexual dimorphism in size, both across species and across human societies. Thus strictly monogamous gibbons are sexually monomorphic (males and females are about the same size), whereas highly polygynous gorillas are equally highly sexually dimorphic in size."
"the average human male is only 17% heavier than the average human female.10 So, on this scale, humans are mildly polygynous, not as polygynous as gorillas (let alone southern elephant seals), but not strictly monogamous like gibbons either."
"a major determinant of the level of polygyny in society [is] income inequality. The more unequal the income distribution, the more polygynous the society...it makes more economic sense for women to share a wealthy man than to monopolize a poor man. In the words of George Bernard Shaw “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one.”"
"much of what we now call interpersonal crime today, such as murder, assault, robbery, and theft, were probably routine means of competition among men for resources and mates. This is how men likely competed for resources and mating opportunities for much of human evolutionary history."
"Less intelligent individuals are significantly more likely to want to become parents, and more intelligent individuals are significantly more likely to want to remain voluntarily childless."
"Among women, childhood general intelligence significantly decreases the number of children they have had in their lifetimes. Among men, it does not. While the effect of childhood general intelligence on women's fertility is consistent with the prediction of the Intelligence Paradox, the lack of the same effect among men is inconsistent with it."
"It is not clear to me why more intelligent men, who wanted fewer children than less intelligent men at the start of their reproductive careers, do not actually have fewer children. This is in sharp contrast to more intelligent women who wanted fewer children and in fact do have fewer children than less intelligent women."
"[Is a demanding career a factor? ] But this is not the case. Only childhood intelligence, not educational achievement or earnings, decreases the number of children women have. Contrary to popular belief, more educated women and women with more demanding careers do not have fewer children and are not more likely to remain childless."
"Another possibility is that women find intelligent men more attractive as mates. The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller has consistently argued that women preferentially select men with higher levels of intelligence to mate with.
[My note: Lack of more intelligent men for these intelligent women, who as a consequence can't fulfil their hypergamy in regard to intelligence]"
"Among both men and women, number of siblings significantly increases the number of children. Since the number of siblings (plus one) is the same as the number of children that their parents had, this means that fertility—the total number of children individuals have—is highly heritable. The more children your parents have had (and hence the more siblings you have), the more children you have yourself."
"Genes determine about 80% of the variance in adult [general] intelligence. On average, more intelligent parents beget more intelligent children. And the genes that influence general intelligence are thought to be located on the X chromosomes. ... It means that boys inherit their general intelligence from their mothers only, while girls inherit their general intelligence from both their mothers and their fathers."
"So women influence the general intelligence of future generations very strongly, through their sons and through their paternal granddaughters. If more intelligent women have fewer children and are more likely to remain childless, then one potential consequence is that the average level of general intelligence in society may decline over time."
"the Lynn-Flynn effect, during the 20th century ... secular rise in IQ due to better infant and child nutrition and health. ... This effect is already halted in advanced industrial nations."
"There is strong evidence to suggest that the Lynn-Flynn Effect was only a 20th-century phenomenon. It appears to have ended at the end of the 20th century in the most advanced industrial nations. Studies suggest that the average level of intelligence has begun to decline at the beginning of the 21st century in such advanced industrial nations as Australia, Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom."
February 12, 2015
I love stumbling upon a book that turns out to be a real gem. The Intelligence Paradox introduced me to the science of evolutionary psychology.
Of course I knew that our ancestors spent a million years as hunter-gathers in Africa. I remember learning about the advent of cultivation of crops; how agriculture changed human society a short 10,000 years ago, when we transitioned from nomads to settlers. Of course I knew about evolution, and that evolution does not anticipate the future. I just hadn't tied it together: that general intelligence is our ability to solve novel problems that did not exist on the African savanna, and just how important our genes (in addition to our environment) are in determining our behavior.
This was an exciting book!
Of course I knew that our ancestors spent a million years as hunter-gathers in Africa. I remember learning about the advent of cultivation of crops; how agriculture changed human society a short 10,000 years ago, when we transitioned from nomads to settlers. Of course I knew about evolution, and that evolution does not anticipate the future. I just hadn't tied it together: that general intelligence is our ability to solve novel problems that did not exist on the African savanna, and just how important our genes (in addition to our environment) are in determining our behavior.
This was an exciting book!
July 9, 2016
The introduction is interesting, however it is barely worth reading past it. Fraught with circular reasoning and far fetched conclusions, it seems the intent of the book was to bring those who think of themselves superior due to their intelligence down from their intellectual high horse. Alas, it fails to do so. I think the contents of this book would have better suited a magazine article.
September 17, 2024
This book was really good, interesting and insightful.
The world of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology is an interesting one and I will definitely return to it thanks to this book.
Amazing and important work.
The world of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology is an interesting one and I will definitely return to it thanks to this book.
Amazing and important work.
May 2, 2014
An evolutionary psychologist's theory attempting to explain why intelligent people are so stupid. The absent-minded professor is the obvious stereotype here, and, like any attempt to explain a stereotype, this theory is fraught with danger, especially the danger of offending those caught up in the generalization. The Moralistic Fallacy is the presumption that the way things ought to be dictates the way things are, a fallacy that Kanazawa does a good job of both explaining and avoiding.
His theory holds that mental prowess falls into two independent categories. The first is defined as evolutionarily familiar, domain-specific abilities like mating, child rearing, facial recognition, sense of direction and language acquisition. The second is defined as evolutionarily novel, domain-general abilities like escaping a flood or a forest fire, abilities that eventually evolved into what we call general intelligence today. The book examines many specific associations between general intelligence and behavior, explaining the association as the result of the behavior being either evolutionarily familiar or evolutionarily novel.
For instance, children born to very bright women are more likely to suffer from low birth weight, have motor development deficiencies, and have social and behavioral problems than children born to women of average or slightly-higher-than-average intelligence. This is partly due to very intelligent women delaying childbirth, but that is precisely what Kanazawa is saying: evolutionarily familiar behaviors are not the domain of the very intelligent.
In one fascinating deep-dive, Kanazawa attempts to explain the association between general intelligence and preference for vocal vs. instrumental music by linking vocal music with language, an evolutionarily familiar trait. Again, the more intelligent a population, the more strongly associated it is with the evolutionarily novel attribute (in this case, instrumental music).
Kanazawa persistently avoids making value judgments on specific associations themselves, and limits his analysis to the associations and the extent to which his theory explains the associations. For examples, general intelligence is strongly associated with homosexuality, political liberalism, vegetarianism, binge drinking and listening to NPR. Kanazawa applies his theory to each and makes no inference about the value of these traits themselves. I found the book to be a refreshingly unvarnished examination of human nature. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
His theory holds that mental prowess falls into two independent categories. The first is defined as evolutionarily familiar, domain-specific abilities like mating, child rearing, facial recognition, sense of direction and language acquisition. The second is defined as evolutionarily novel, domain-general abilities like escaping a flood or a forest fire, abilities that eventually evolved into what we call general intelligence today. The book examines many specific associations between general intelligence and behavior, explaining the association as the result of the behavior being either evolutionarily familiar or evolutionarily novel.
For instance, children born to very bright women are more likely to suffer from low birth weight, have motor development deficiencies, and have social and behavioral problems than children born to women of average or slightly-higher-than-average intelligence. This is partly due to very intelligent women delaying childbirth, but that is precisely what Kanazawa is saying: evolutionarily familiar behaviors are not the domain of the very intelligent.
In one fascinating deep-dive, Kanazawa attempts to explain the association between general intelligence and preference for vocal vs. instrumental music by linking vocal music with language, an evolutionarily familiar trait. Again, the more intelligent a population, the more strongly associated it is with the evolutionarily novel attribute (in this case, instrumental music).
Kanazawa persistently avoids making value judgments on specific associations themselves, and limits his analysis to the associations and the extent to which his theory explains the associations. For examples, general intelligence is strongly associated with homosexuality, political liberalism, vegetarianism, binge drinking and listening to NPR. Kanazawa applies his theory to each and makes no inference about the value of these traits themselves. I found the book to be a refreshingly unvarnished examination of human nature. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
December 9, 2017
DNF
As you can see from this graph here, intellectual people will start reading this book and come to conclusion of burning it, or throwing it away, at the very least, because there's so much bullshit I got tired of snorting and rolling my eyes.
As you can see from this graph here, intellectual people will start reading this book and come to conclusion of burning it, or throwing it away, at the very least, because there's so much bullshit I got tired of snorting and rolling my eyes.
February 25, 2026
The forces of the enforced ignorance are so strong these days that it is delightful to hear an independent voice.
People who do the kind of research Kanazawa does often cannot get published. The get fired from their jobs at conservative as well as liberal think tanks. They have a hard time getting tenure at universities. There is little freedom of inquiry left in the realms in which Kanazawa works. For that reason alone it is delightful to see him publish such a politically incorrect work as this.
In his preface Kanazawa credits the giants who preceded him. Robert Trivers, Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, just to name three. What I hoped in reading this book was to find a worthy successor to these, the latter two of whom died just last year. My hopes remain somewhat unfulfilled. While Kanazawa has the courage to beard any lion in its den, he has some shortcomings when it comes to structure and research.
The introduction to the book is a delight. It is a defense of academic freedom, the right of an academic, indeed, the obligation of an academic, to pursue the truth wherever it takes him. Quite specifically, this pursuit of truth should not be constrained by concerns about what the implications might be of the truths that are found. He talks about the great fallacies, the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. These are worth repeating right here in this this review, because they are so pervasive and academics today.
"The naturalistic fallacy, which was coined by the English philosopher George Edward Moore in the early 20th century, though first identified much earlier by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, is the leap from is to ought--that is, the tendency to believe that what is natural is good; that what is, ought to be. For example, one might commit the error of the naturalistic fallacy and say, "Because different groups of people are genetically different and endowed with different innate abilities and talents, they ought to be treated differently."
"The moralistic fallacy, coined by the Harvard microbiologist Bernard Davis in the 1970s, is the opposite of the naturalistic fallacy. It refers to the leap from ought to is, the claim that the way things ought to be is the way they are. This is the tendency to believe that what is good is natural; that what ought to be, is. For example, one might commit the error of the moralistic fallacy and say, "Because everybody ought to be treated equally, there are no innate genetic differences between groups of people." The science writer extraordinaire Matt Ridley calls it the reverse naturalistic fallacy."
The scientist cannot afford to be blinded by any of this. However, the frightening thing is that the vast number of them are. Read my review of "Race Decoded" for an example. Stephen Jay Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" is a classic example of a political screed masquerading as science. Its specious arguments still sway liberal-arts majors by the thousands.
Kanazawa depends vary greatly on statistical techniques, especially factor analysis. For a work that depends so heavily on statistics, he does very little to explain his statistical methods. He sometimes assumes that the reader knows nothing, and at others a great deal. On the nothing side, talking about intelligence distribution, he says that 5% of the population is very bright (IQ>125) and 20% bright (110-125). No statistical terms whatsoever. Elsewhere, however, he uses the statistical terms of mean and standard deviation, without a background as to how the latter is an expression of how the Gaussian distribution (bell curve) indicates how rare or common a given IQ score is. Here is the title of one of his graphs: "Figure 4.1 Partial association between lifetime number of sex partners and number of children among the less intelligent." The plot shows an upward slanting line amid a sea of dots. The index for children runs from -4 to 8; for sex partners from -100 to 300 (Wilt Chamberlain wasn't one of the dots.) A reasonable person might wonder how it is possible to have a negative number of either children or sex partners. It would help to provide said reasonable person with a discussion of "partialing out" variables in multiple linear regression. Without this help, the average reader will simply say, "Huh?"
Elsewhere, he sometimes normalizes his variables to a mean mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. That's well and good for statisticians, but he is writing a book with a real world audience. The topics he chooses, why homosexuals may be smarter than straight people, why and chosen people are not having children, are aimed to the general audience. He is expecting a higher level of understanding of statistics then he has any right to assume.
Kanazawa's intro says that "Most of the empirical analyses that are summarized in this book use three different data sets: General Social Surveys (GSS) in the US, National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) in the US, and the National Child Development Study (NCDS) in the UK." These are long term surveys. The GSS surveys 1500 people (3000 every other year) on a large number of topics. Add Health is a longitudinal survey - it follows 20,000 school children who were selected in 1994-95 through life. The NCDS follows all children born in Great Britain during one week in 1958 (17,000) through life. Each of the surveys includes an IQ component, or a good enough proxy for IQ to satisfy Kanazawa's purposes. As is usually the case in social science, he can be thankful to others' extensive labor in compiling what he got, but has to be mindful of the limitations. Each survey is constrained by the way the questions are worded and the questions that were asked. In each survey participants drop out in non-random ways. The surveys are culture-bound (US and UK) and bound in the case of longitudinal studies to late Baby Boomers (Great Britain) and late Gen X (United States). Societies change over time, and he has chosen cohorts each of which represents only one point on a time continuum. Most significantly, he generalizes from the US and UK to Europe, which might work, and to Asia, which probably does not. He could be accused of being influenced by the "streetlight effect," about which Wikipedia says "The streetlight effect is a type of observational bias where people only look for whatever they are searching by looking where it is easiest.
Surveys are by their nature are imperfect instruments. They generally ask the respondent to answer on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" or something similar. How the question is worded affects the answer. The respondent may be culturally inclined to avoid - or to take- extreme positions. Survey designers usually include several related questions, so they can compose aggregate answers which are more telling than the individual ones. Still, it is an imperfect art.
Kanawawa's overarching theme is that intelligence correlates highly with a love of novelty, and that our love of novelty often takes us in evolutionarily unsuccessful directions. It is pitched towards a fairly general audience - liberal arts majors. Therefore, the level of statistical understanding that he expects exceeds what can be expected of the type of audience he wants to attract.
The novel things he says we do include among other things homosexual practices, getting a university education, embrace the kinds of universal altruism represented by liberal dogmas, and using drugs and alcohol. To me the point seems a little bit of a stretch. I think that he is at least in part conflating trends which are taken place within American society, or all of Western society over the last century, with with his thesis of novelty.
Classic liberalism was not what we moderns would call liberal: more like libertarianism. The eugenics movement of a century ago was certainly what one would call conservative movement that was led by Victorian intellectuals. Fascism and communism were broad extensions of government, but certainly not consistent with modern liberalism. So to say that liberals are the ones who seek novelty, and are thus intelligent, is a somewhat shaky thesis. Novelty seekers have not always been liberal. An alternative thesis (America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)) would note that since liberals claimed control of the American campuses worldwide campuses about the 1960s and haven't let it go. Therefore everybody experiencing a university education in the West is brainwashed with an inordinate degree of liberal thought. The question is not why many of them turn out to be liberal, but how some of them manage to survive a college education these days and remain conservative. In other words, it should not attributed merely to the novelty of liberalism.
One observation I will make which Kanazawa should is that there are far more people of exceptional intelligence among North Asian populations than there are among Caucasians. Just by brute numbers, the Chinese and the Koreans and Japanese together number about time and a half the worldwide Caucasian population. As Kanazawa notes, they have a higher average intelligence. Put the two facts together, and the higher up you go in intelligence, 125 would be his cutoff, the greater the proportion of North Asians. By my rough statistics, about three times as many North Asians should have an IQ over 125 as Caucasians. In Excel, =1.5*(1-NORMDIST(125,105,15,TRUE))/(1-NORMDIST(125,100,15,TRUE)). Orientals don't display the same kind of liberalism, and they have a markedly different intellectual history than we do in the West. His thesis certainly should be tested against what's happening in the lands of his ancestors.
I found the book's treatment of homosexuality to be quite interesting. Kanazawa found some sources that I had not seen before, and his percentage attribution of homosexuality to genetics, environment in utero, and the environment in which a child grows up I found to be reasonably credible. He also had a useful four-way division of the definition of homosexuality. How people define themselves, what they do, their reports of the kind of erotic response they feel when exposed same-sex images, and objectively measured response to sexual stimuli. In other words not everybody's going to agree on who is a homosexual who is not. It's a question both of definite feelings and actions, and latent characteristics that may or may not be expressed. All that said, the differences he finds in intelligence between gays and straights seems to be seems to be fairly high. Again, one wonders what he would find in different societies.
One strength of his discussions about homosexuality is his reference to ethnographic literature citing homosexuality in 1500 societies around the world. Basically, it was not much noticed by anthropologists, and he defends the anthropologist's ability to notice these things. I would agree with them that homosexuality is much more evident today than it was even during my childhood 60 years ago. This may be a function of simply revealing latent traits that were there all along, but I suspected it also involves a greater element of choice than the homosexual community would like to admit.
The statistics he presents on the marked difference in intelligence between liberals and conservatives is quite surprising. I could believe this among white populations. Although he does not say which populations he is dealing with, his text reads as if he's talking about white people. However, although this book does not dwell on it, Kanazawa recognizes in his introduction that that black and Hispanic populations are significantly below the whites in average intelligence, and their voting is certainly what a modern would call liberal. Therefore if he is talking about all populations in the United States or in Western Europe, I would be suspicious of his case that liberals are more intelligent. Being conservative is contrary to the interests of less intelligent people. Nobody disputes that less intelligent people benefit more from government largess in government handouts, and most people are at least smart enough to vote their economic self-interest.
I conclude that at the top end of the intelligence distribution he is probably right. The collegiate liberals are people who feel they can be magnanimous with other people's money, and even some of their own. Father down the intelligence and income distribution I think he's got it wrong.
Kanazawa's treatment of religion seems to be quite simplistic. He says that the religious are less intelligent than atheists. I would quibble on several points. First of all, a great many people who claim not to believe in any identified religion cling religiously and without any intellectual curiosity to elements of their liberal dogma. Environmentalism is one of these things, vegetarianism, belief in holistic medicines, bottled water and the evils of circumcision - the list goes on. And they're adamant, as adamant as a fundamentalist with his rattlesnakes.
I pose a philosopher's question, what is religion? Another question would be about religion within cultures. Islam, Hasidic Judaism, and Christian fundamentalism are all quite different. The religion is part and parcel of the culture. I would bet that Mormons and Hasidic Jews are smarter than the average white person. So to generalize about religious belief I think glosses over some pretty important aspects of culture which are associated with religion. Simply to say that atheism is novel is nothing new. Again, there would be a lot to be gained by a discussion of North Asians. The Chinese and Japanese do not have religions in the same sense as people in the West. There is certainly no belief in the divinity of a person such as Christ or the status of a person such as Mohammed. There, religious leaders are regarded as teachers and seldom much more. So one follows the teachers, but one doesn't believe in their divinity. I would call them atheists. Any discussion of religion that doesn't include what the North Asians believe, is kind of off the track. One might well also include Indians, who have a vast number of beliefs, but are not points of belief in divinity in the same way that Christians Jews and Muslims, people of the book, believe in their God.
Certainly more intelligent people led the drug revolution in the US in the `60s. I was there - Berkeley. However, I note that where I now live in Ukraine, the 20-somethings from the top universities with whom I associate have no experience with drugs. Here, as in Brazilian favelas, it is the dead-enders in the lower rungs of society who do drugs. They sniff glue and do needle drugs. For them it is not novelty - it is culture.
As far as sexual experimentation goes, that too changes quite rapidly. I witnessed it go from quite prudish in the `50s, when knocking a girl up was a disaster, to very loose during the sexual revolution of the 60s, to increasingly guarded, first when herpes became widespread, then AIDS. Culture also played a part, especially changing, unpredictable feminist notions of what they wanted men to be. Whether and how a guy got sex changed like lady's fashions - because it was in part a fashion concern. The novel thing is the swiftness with which it changes - for everybody.
In conclusion, I would like to say that what this field of evolutionary biology needs is more people like Kanazawa. Specifically, Kanazawa needs more people against whom he can bounce his ideas. A lot of these ideas are kind of off the wall. They would have benefited by being polished by a larger number of associates with similar views. Unfortunately, the academy the universities absolutely discourage people think and talk about these subjects, and therefore the number who are bold enough to work in this field is quite limited. Kanazawa must feel like he is the last of the Mohicans, the Lone Ranger. I hope his bravado inspires others to stand up against the tyranny of political correctness and join him in doing real science. He has put forth ideas which merit deeper study. Hope somebody rises to the challenge, and helps Kanazawa polish his theses.
People who do the kind of research Kanazawa does often cannot get published. The get fired from their jobs at conservative as well as liberal think tanks. They have a hard time getting tenure at universities. There is little freedom of inquiry left in the realms in which Kanazawa works. For that reason alone it is delightful to see him publish such a politically incorrect work as this.
In his preface Kanazawa credits the giants who preceded him. Robert Trivers, Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, just to name three. What I hoped in reading this book was to find a worthy successor to these, the latter two of whom died just last year. My hopes remain somewhat unfulfilled. While Kanazawa has the courage to beard any lion in its den, he has some shortcomings when it comes to structure and research.
The introduction to the book is a delight. It is a defense of academic freedom, the right of an academic, indeed, the obligation of an academic, to pursue the truth wherever it takes him. Quite specifically, this pursuit of truth should not be constrained by concerns about what the implications might be of the truths that are found. He talks about the great fallacies, the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. These are worth repeating right here in this this review, because they are so pervasive and academics today.
"The naturalistic fallacy, which was coined by the English philosopher George Edward Moore in the early 20th century, though first identified much earlier by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, is the leap from is to ought--that is, the tendency to believe that what is natural is good; that what is, ought to be. For example, one might commit the error of the naturalistic fallacy and say, "Because different groups of people are genetically different and endowed with different innate abilities and talents, they ought to be treated differently."
"The moralistic fallacy, coined by the Harvard microbiologist Bernard Davis in the 1970s, is the opposite of the naturalistic fallacy. It refers to the leap from ought to is, the claim that the way things ought to be is the way they are. This is the tendency to believe that what is good is natural; that what ought to be, is. For example, one might commit the error of the moralistic fallacy and say, "Because everybody ought to be treated equally, there are no innate genetic differences between groups of people." The science writer extraordinaire Matt Ridley calls it the reverse naturalistic fallacy."
The scientist cannot afford to be blinded by any of this. However, the frightening thing is that the vast number of them are. Read my review of "Race Decoded" for an example. Stephen Jay Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" is a classic example of a political screed masquerading as science. Its specious arguments still sway liberal-arts majors by the thousands.
Kanazawa depends vary greatly on statistical techniques, especially factor analysis. For a work that depends so heavily on statistics, he does very little to explain his statistical methods. He sometimes assumes that the reader knows nothing, and at others a great deal. On the nothing side, talking about intelligence distribution, he says that 5% of the population is very bright (IQ>125) and 20% bright (110-125). No statistical terms whatsoever. Elsewhere, however, he uses the statistical terms of mean and standard deviation, without a background as to how the latter is an expression of how the Gaussian distribution (bell curve) indicates how rare or common a given IQ score is. Here is the title of one of his graphs: "Figure 4.1 Partial association between lifetime number of sex partners and number of children among the less intelligent." The plot shows an upward slanting line amid a sea of dots. The index for children runs from -4 to 8; for sex partners from -100 to 300 (Wilt Chamberlain wasn't one of the dots.) A reasonable person might wonder how it is possible to have a negative number of either children or sex partners. It would help to provide said reasonable person with a discussion of "partialing out" variables in multiple linear regression. Without this help, the average reader will simply say, "Huh?"
Elsewhere, he sometimes normalizes his variables to a mean mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. That's well and good for statisticians, but he is writing a book with a real world audience. The topics he chooses, why homosexuals may be smarter than straight people, why and chosen people are not having children, are aimed to the general audience. He is expecting a higher level of understanding of statistics then he has any right to assume.
Kanazawa's intro says that "Most of the empirical analyses that are summarized in this book use three different data sets: General Social Surveys (GSS) in the US, National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) in the US, and the National Child Development Study (NCDS) in the UK." These are long term surveys. The GSS surveys 1500 people (3000 every other year) on a large number of topics. Add Health is a longitudinal survey - it follows 20,000 school children who were selected in 1994-95 through life. The NCDS follows all children born in Great Britain during one week in 1958 (17,000) through life. Each of the surveys includes an IQ component, or a good enough proxy for IQ to satisfy Kanazawa's purposes. As is usually the case in social science, he can be thankful to others' extensive labor in compiling what he got, but has to be mindful of the limitations. Each survey is constrained by the way the questions are worded and the questions that were asked. In each survey participants drop out in non-random ways. The surveys are culture-bound (US and UK) and bound in the case of longitudinal studies to late Baby Boomers (Great Britain) and late Gen X (United States). Societies change over time, and he has chosen cohorts each of which represents only one point on a time continuum. Most significantly, he generalizes from the US and UK to Europe, which might work, and to Asia, which probably does not. He could be accused of being influenced by the "streetlight effect," about which Wikipedia says "The streetlight effect is a type of observational bias where people only look for whatever they are searching by looking where it is easiest.
Surveys are by their nature are imperfect instruments. They generally ask the respondent to answer on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" or something similar. How the question is worded affects the answer. The respondent may be culturally inclined to avoid - or to take- extreme positions. Survey designers usually include several related questions, so they can compose aggregate answers which are more telling than the individual ones. Still, it is an imperfect art.
Kanawawa's overarching theme is that intelligence correlates highly with a love of novelty, and that our love of novelty often takes us in evolutionarily unsuccessful directions. It is pitched towards a fairly general audience - liberal arts majors. Therefore, the level of statistical understanding that he expects exceeds what can be expected of the type of audience he wants to attract.
The novel things he says we do include among other things homosexual practices, getting a university education, embrace the kinds of universal altruism represented by liberal dogmas, and using drugs and alcohol. To me the point seems a little bit of a stretch. I think that he is at least in part conflating trends which are taken place within American society, or all of Western society over the last century, with with his thesis of novelty.
Classic liberalism was not what we moderns would call liberal: more like libertarianism. The eugenics movement of a century ago was certainly what one would call conservative movement that was led by Victorian intellectuals. Fascism and communism were broad extensions of government, but certainly not consistent with modern liberalism. So to say that liberals are the ones who seek novelty, and are thus intelligent, is a somewhat shaky thesis. Novelty seekers have not always been liberal. An alternative thesis (America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)) would note that since liberals claimed control of the American campuses worldwide campuses about the 1960s and haven't let it go. Therefore everybody experiencing a university education in the West is brainwashed with an inordinate degree of liberal thought. The question is not why many of them turn out to be liberal, but how some of them manage to survive a college education these days and remain conservative. In other words, it should not attributed merely to the novelty of liberalism.
One observation I will make which Kanazawa should is that there are far more people of exceptional intelligence among North Asian populations than there are among Caucasians. Just by brute numbers, the Chinese and the Koreans and Japanese together number about time and a half the worldwide Caucasian population. As Kanazawa notes, they have a higher average intelligence. Put the two facts together, and the higher up you go in intelligence, 125 would be his cutoff, the greater the proportion of North Asians. By my rough statistics, about three times as many North Asians should have an IQ over 125 as Caucasians. In Excel, =1.5*(1-NORMDIST(125,105,15,TRUE))/(1-NORMDIST(125,100,15,TRUE)). Orientals don't display the same kind of liberalism, and they have a markedly different intellectual history than we do in the West. His thesis certainly should be tested against what's happening in the lands of his ancestors.
I found the book's treatment of homosexuality to be quite interesting. Kanazawa found some sources that I had not seen before, and his percentage attribution of homosexuality to genetics, environment in utero, and the environment in which a child grows up I found to be reasonably credible. He also had a useful four-way division of the definition of homosexuality. How people define themselves, what they do, their reports of the kind of erotic response they feel when exposed same-sex images, and objectively measured response to sexual stimuli. In other words not everybody's going to agree on who is a homosexual who is not. It's a question both of definite feelings and actions, and latent characteristics that may or may not be expressed. All that said, the differences he finds in intelligence between gays and straights seems to be seems to be fairly high. Again, one wonders what he would find in different societies.
One strength of his discussions about homosexuality is his reference to ethnographic literature citing homosexuality in 1500 societies around the world. Basically, it was not much noticed by anthropologists, and he defends the anthropologist's ability to notice these things. I would agree with them that homosexuality is much more evident today than it was even during my childhood 60 years ago. This may be a function of simply revealing latent traits that were there all along, but I suspected it also involves a greater element of choice than the homosexual community would like to admit.
The statistics he presents on the marked difference in intelligence between liberals and conservatives is quite surprising. I could believe this among white populations. Although he does not say which populations he is dealing with, his text reads as if he's talking about white people. However, although this book does not dwell on it, Kanazawa recognizes in his introduction that that black and Hispanic populations are significantly below the whites in average intelligence, and their voting is certainly what a modern would call liberal. Therefore if he is talking about all populations in the United States or in Western Europe, I would be suspicious of his case that liberals are more intelligent. Being conservative is contrary to the interests of less intelligent people. Nobody disputes that less intelligent people benefit more from government largess in government handouts, and most people are at least smart enough to vote their economic self-interest.
I conclude that at the top end of the intelligence distribution he is probably right. The collegiate liberals are people who feel they can be magnanimous with other people's money, and even some of their own. Father down the intelligence and income distribution I think he's got it wrong.
Kanazawa's treatment of religion seems to be quite simplistic. He says that the religious are less intelligent than atheists. I would quibble on several points. First of all, a great many people who claim not to believe in any identified religion cling religiously and without any intellectual curiosity to elements of their liberal dogma. Environmentalism is one of these things, vegetarianism, belief in holistic medicines, bottled water and the evils of circumcision - the list goes on. And they're adamant, as adamant as a fundamentalist with his rattlesnakes.
I pose a philosopher's question, what is religion? Another question would be about religion within cultures. Islam, Hasidic Judaism, and Christian fundamentalism are all quite different. The religion is part and parcel of the culture. I would bet that Mormons and Hasidic Jews are smarter than the average white person. So to generalize about religious belief I think glosses over some pretty important aspects of culture which are associated with religion. Simply to say that atheism is novel is nothing new. Again, there would be a lot to be gained by a discussion of North Asians. The Chinese and Japanese do not have religions in the same sense as people in the West. There is certainly no belief in the divinity of a person such as Christ or the status of a person such as Mohammed. There, religious leaders are regarded as teachers and seldom much more. So one follows the teachers, but one doesn't believe in their divinity. I would call them atheists. Any discussion of religion that doesn't include what the North Asians believe, is kind of off the track. One might well also include Indians, who have a vast number of beliefs, but are not points of belief in divinity in the same way that Christians Jews and Muslims, people of the book, believe in their God.
Certainly more intelligent people led the drug revolution in the US in the `60s. I was there - Berkeley. However, I note that where I now live in Ukraine, the 20-somethings from the top universities with whom I associate have no experience with drugs. Here, as in Brazilian favelas, it is the dead-enders in the lower rungs of society who do drugs. They sniff glue and do needle drugs. For them it is not novelty - it is culture.
As far as sexual experimentation goes, that too changes quite rapidly. I witnessed it go from quite prudish in the `50s, when knocking a girl up was a disaster, to very loose during the sexual revolution of the 60s, to increasingly guarded, first when herpes became widespread, then AIDS. Culture also played a part, especially changing, unpredictable feminist notions of what they wanted men to be. Whether and how a guy got sex changed like lady's fashions - because it was in part a fashion concern. The novel thing is the swiftness with which it changes - for everybody.
In conclusion, I would like to say that what this field of evolutionary biology needs is more people like Kanazawa. Specifically, Kanazawa needs more people against whom he can bounce his ideas. A lot of these ideas are kind of off the wall. They would have benefited by being polished by a larger number of associates with similar views. Unfortunately, the academy the universities absolutely discourage people think and talk about these subjects, and therefore the number who are bold enough to work in this field is quite limited. Kanazawa must feel like he is the last of the Mohicans, the Lone Ranger. I hope his bravado inspires others to stand up against the tyranny of political correctness and join him in doing real science. He has put forth ideas which merit deeper study. Hope somebody rises to the challenge, and helps Kanazawa polish his theses.
August 3, 2016
This is an enjoyable read. Understanding intelligence from an evolutionary perspective do question the common mindset. Apart from all the statistics supporting the Intelligent Paradox and citing various phenomenon, I particularly agree what the author suggests at the beginning chapters; science is about finding the truth and does not itself make any value or moral judgments on what is right/wrong about the findings. I guess this is the fundamental principle of science, which the society today kind of miss out on.
While the book suggests that intelligence is just another human trait that every human being shares and in which everyone of us has varying levels of it, I don't think the human society is able to accept such conclusion yet. Almost all of the industrialized societies today are built on a system where intelligence is highly valued. I guess it would be near impossible to change the mindset of people.
While the book suggests that intelligence is just another human trait that every human being shares and in which everyone of us has varying levels of it, I don't think the human society is able to accept such conclusion yet. Almost all of the industrialized societies today are built on a system where intelligence is highly valued. I guess it would be near impossible to change the mindset of people.
January 3, 2013
Interesting view of intelligence; in a nutshell: intelligence is really just evolutionary novelty. The difference between smart and intelligent is broken down in a very easy to understand fashion. In the end the author just wants to diminish the value that we as society place on intelligence, where common sense, or smarts, may be a much better aspiration. Specifically, those who reproduce fruitfully are the real beneficiaries of society's intelligence (even when whey themselves are not).
The idea was new to me, although obvious in hind-sight. However, once I got past the introduction I didn't really get anything out of the book. A 2 page magazine article would have been sufficient for this topic; in other words read the introduction and skip the rest of the book.
The book was a very easy read.
The idea was new to me, although obvious in hind-sight. However, once I got past the introduction I didn't really get anything out of the book. A 2 page magazine article would have been sufficient for this topic; in other words read the introduction and skip the rest of the book.
The book was a very easy read.
March 10, 2020
Am I the only person who found this book offensive?
He did make some interesting points here and there but I felt it was 20% evidence based and 80% personal opinion.
...."That's why liberals are stupider then conservatives"
Not just once but he mentions this mabey half a dozen times using the word stupid and stupider. Even if it's a proven fact (which I dont believe it is) the terminology is offensive to me.
He then goes on to tell us that homosexuals are more intelligent than straight people and waffles on about peoples sexual preferences for ages.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought homosexuals were basically ordinary human beings with a whole mixture of intelligence levels.
Found myself becoming more and more annoyed with the author and finished up thinking he was just a right wing A-hole
He did make some interesting points here and there but I felt it was 20% evidence based and 80% personal opinion.
...."That's why liberals are stupider then conservatives"
Not just once but he mentions this mabey half a dozen times using the word stupid and stupider. Even if it's a proven fact (which I dont believe it is) the terminology is offensive to me.
He then goes on to tell us that homosexuals are more intelligent than straight people and waffles on about peoples sexual preferences for ages.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought homosexuals were basically ordinary human beings with a whole mixture of intelligence levels.
Found myself becoming more and more annoyed with the author and finished up thinking he was just a right wing A-hole
June 13, 2018
In his first chapter he takes a swipe at the left and complains that the majority of the academic community are left. He also says he doesn't care that people die, he just wants to know why, then grandiosely talks about how science offends people etc etc... It appears to be a bit chest thumping I guess like the apes we all have evolved from, he just wants to make enemies that is not our innate human nature. Ultimately, if there is something that we don't do the promotes the continuation of the species it makes it smarter. Homosexuals are smarter, vegetarians are smarter, we are smarter for drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco, even women who are smarter dont have children.. interesting but maybe requires a grain of salt..
July 27, 2016
So are intelligent people sociopaths and do things contrary to their best interests? Whether it's true or not this is a fascinating and thought provoking book. Are more intelligent women less likely to be good mothers and wives? Are liberals, who generally want to help strangers and society as a whole, actually hurting their own chances of survival? It's not as clear cut as that but the author uses some pretty convincing data and analysis to show that IQ, an inherited trait, just like height or skin color, is nothing more than a biological tool meant for survival but in fact often times has the opposite affect in modernity. At least I got the one IQ question correct in the book ...
November 25, 2022
This book was very informative and aided me in my college class! I am currently taking a course at Saint Leo University called Psychology of Learning, and this book dove into depth the introduction to intelligence. I feel the author's writing feels very genuine, and I could see myself in the author. There were very few things I disagreed with what they stated in the book. They provide honest and objective scientific data to develop theories about human behavior.
August 11, 2012
An excellent discussion of intelligence in the context of evolutionary psychology - which explains human behaviour in the context of evolution (and that evolution has equipped us to cope with hunter gatherer living of 10 000 years age).
February 5, 2020
This book gives some good information at the beginning. Soon though, it degenerates in an endless list of study results, which could demonstrate literally anything.
The conclusions are disappointing. Thinking that intelligence is just another trait like height or weight is a non-sense.
The conclusions are disappointing. Thinking that intelligence is just another trait like height or weight is a non-sense.
February 20, 2020
This is a book about Intelligence in human beings, and how the choices it begets are either evolutionary novel or evolutionary familiar, in accordance with the Savana Principle. Whoosh-long sentence!
Everyone is equally intelligent might be politically correct but logically bonkers. A range of intelligence should be accepted in a pluralistic spirit, and maybe digested with a Descartian spirit of generational development.
According to the book, intelligent people lack common sense and make stupid choices. Stepping over the debate about different types of intelligence, the general intelligence measured through the IQ measurement tells a lot about someone choices or vice versa. The results were concluded with some statistical wizardry and controlling of variables of two data sets: NCDS of UK and Add Health of USA.
Here is the list: Intelligent people have a tendency to steer towards being liberals; atheists; night owls; homosexuals; faithless. Also, they tend to listen to classical music, remain exclusive in relationships, and most importantly tend to choose not to have children (it's another thing that women are more rigid to this conviction than men).
Basically being intelligent means being good at novel things, things that your brain is not automatically trained for via generational evolution.
The book was interesting to read despite its audacious conclusions from a 'small' set of data covering hardly a Horton's Who. It did fall in quality halfway with unnecessary connections and adding pages for no reason. Be sceptical of conclusions and refine them, and don't get into an intelligence complex for no good reason. Remember 'you are like totally smart' and the world is definitely not failing into Idiocracy.
Everyone is equally intelligent might be politically correct but logically bonkers. A range of intelligence should be accepted in a pluralistic spirit, and maybe digested with a Descartian spirit of generational development.
According to the book, intelligent people lack common sense and make stupid choices. Stepping over the debate about different types of intelligence, the general intelligence measured through the IQ measurement tells a lot about someone choices or vice versa. The results were concluded with some statistical wizardry and controlling of variables of two data sets: NCDS of UK and Add Health of USA.
Here is the list: Intelligent people have a tendency to steer towards being liberals; atheists; night owls; homosexuals; faithless. Also, they tend to listen to classical music, remain exclusive in relationships, and most importantly tend to choose not to have children (it's another thing that women are more rigid to this conviction than men).
Basically being intelligent means being good at novel things, things that your brain is not automatically trained for via generational evolution.
The book was interesting to read despite its audacious conclusions from a 'small' set of data covering hardly a Horton's Who. It did fall in quality halfway with unnecessary connections and adding pages for no reason. Be sceptical of conclusions and refine them, and don't get into an intelligence complex for no good reason. Remember 'you are like totally smart' and the world is definitely not failing into Idiocracy.
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January 6, 2020Al principio me quede muy fascinado con las nuevas ideas sobre la inteligencia que presentaba Satoshi, poco a poco me di cuenta que lo que el llama inteligencia es algo medible, en otras palabras el IQ dando entender que no es lo mismo ser inteligente que es listo. Y a partir de aquí me di cuenta como mi enojo era la emoción más sobresaliente. Estaba jugando con mi definición de inteligencia. Uno entiendo la palabra inteligencia como algo bueno que hay que alcanzar pero según sus investigaciones la inteligencia se desarrolla a partir de la evolución, todo lo que es "evolutionary novelty" algo que es nuevo en la evolución. Una vez que entiendes esto (o al menos así lo entendí jajaja) es fácil dejar de juzgar lo que dice.
Un ejemplo es lo siguiente:
Es natural la violación pero no es natural conseguir un doctorado. Es algo ruidoso este enunciado pero es verdad según la evolución ya que como explica en "Sabana principles" si algo no estaba en nuestro antepasado nuestra mente no logra comprender al 100% un ejemplo es la pornografía, aún y cuando sabes que no es verdad te llegas a excitar.
La gente inteligente ignora el sentido común que es la forma más sencilla de conseguir lo que deseas, este libro está lleno de cosas muy interesantes pero al final te das cuenta que es información que Satoshi recopila para después sacar conclusiones sin una investigación previa y a fondo, todo es gracias a su experiencia. En otras palabras "El mar es azul, no lo he visto pero gracias a esta fotografía que encontré en este libro de 1890 se que lo es"
Me quedo con la idea que ser inteligente no es bueno ni malo.
Un ejemplo es lo siguiente:
Es natural la violación pero no es natural conseguir un doctorado. Es algo ruidoso este enunciado pero es verdad según la evolución ya que como explica en "Sabana principles" si algo no estaba en nuestro antepasado nuestra mente no logra comprender al 100% un ejemplo es la pornografía, aún y cuando sabes que no es verdad te llegas a excitar.
La gente inteligente ignora el sentido común que es la forma más sencilla de conseguir lo que deseas, este libro está lleno de cosas muy interesantes pero al final te das cuenta que es información que Satoshi recopila para después sacar conclusiones sin una investigación previa y a fondo, todo es gracias a su experiencia. En otras palabras "El mar es azul, no lo he visto pero gracias a esta fotografía que encontré en este libro de 1890 se que lo es"
Me quedo con la idea que ser inteligente no es bueno ni malo.
February 5, 2019
I listed to this on audiobook which I usually can’t get through but it was so interesting and the audiobook voice was great, I couldn’t stop listening to it. I found this book absolutely fascinating.
I must be honest and say that the book isn’t for the light reader or someone who can’t handle heavy explanations of mathematical and science concepts. Some of it was above my head but most of the time I was able to follow along. It was a little back and forth with some of the book seemingly written to academics and some of it written to the average reader. It’s definitely a book you need to give your full attention to.
Also I want to point out that the author really knows his stuff. He did heavy amounts of research and shares his sources in the book. He cross references multiple sources and uses mathematical methods to explain statistics. He didn’t just come up with the idea for this book and write it in a few months, you can tell. He must have spent years on research and writing.
The author also tells it like it is. He shares what he has learned, even though others will undoubtedly take offense to what he writes. You have to be open minded. Satoshi uses his intelligence paradox (and evolutionary psychology) to show what atheists, liberals, homosexuals, instrumental music lovers, night owls and others are more intelligent. He goes on to explain though that intelligence is NOT the same thing as smart and that in fact, more intelligent people are more likely to do dumb things. Nothing in the book is discriminatory, it’s all based in evolutionary psychological fact.
I must be honest and say that the book isn’t for the light reader or someone who can’t handle heavy explanations of mathematical and science concepts. Some of it was above my head but most of the time I was able to follow along. It was a little back and forth with some of the book seemingly written to academics and some of it written to the average reader. It’s definitely a book you need to give your full attention to.
Also I want to point out that the author really knows his stuff. He did heavy amounts of research and shares his sources in the book. He cross references multiple sources and uses mathematical methods to explain statistics. He didn’t just come up with the idea for this book and write it in a few months, you can tell. He must have spent years on research and writing.
The author also tells it like it is. He shares what he has learned, even though others will undoubtedly take offense to what he writes. You have to be open minded. Satoshi uses his intelligence paradox (and evolutionary psychology) to show what atheists, liberals, homosexuals, instrumental music lovers, night owls and others are more intelligent. He goes on to explain though that intelligence is NOT the same thing as smart and that in fact, more intelligent people are more likely to do dumb things. Nothing in the book is discriminatory, it’s all based in evolutionary psychological fact.
October 10, 2023
I don’t have an inferiority complex about my intelligence, so my less than favorable review is not entirely related to how I feel it relates to myself personally. I think this book makes good observations and has good information for some people not already acquainted with these concepts. It’s a good introduction to these stereotypes of intelligence. But as most people know, stereotypes are not absolute laws for how people act. I think it still fails to consider how strongly environmental factors influence people’s lives. A person could have near perfect genetics and intelligence but if they’re limited by the environment, good genes and high intelligence can only go so far. For example it makes sense for blacks on average to have higher than average blood pressure, if due to averages they more often than other ethnic groups in USA to live in stressful low income/high crime environments which causes stress which causes high blood pressure. Also, humans are animals but not uncivilized wild animals, so I think it commits the appeal to nature fallacy to push polygamy. We’re different from other animals, in so many ways. Humans have so many languages and ways of communicating, so many way to express feelings artistically, we have calendars/timers/clocks- the concept of time, geography/navigation, technology. Our high intelligence is what sets us apart from other animals, it’s in our name, so it makes no sense to look to less evolved creatures for guidance on how we should view/manage our sex lives and reproduction.
July 27, 2023
Iš šios knygos tikėjausi daugiau. Pradžia buvo daug žadanti, bet stilius panašus tiesiog į publicistinio straipsnio, tik žymiai ilgesnio. Daug statistinių duomenų, kurie pateikti labai keistai ir pasirodė, kad tendencingai. Labai keista buvo, kai lygino JAV ir Jungtinės Karalystės apklausos rezultatus, kur JAV aukštesnio intelekto žmonės suaugė daugiau rūkė, o JK mažiau. Autorius nenorėjo sutikti, kad JK reklaminė kampanija, kai ant cigarečių pakelių uždėtos nuotraukos ir užrašai apie rūkymo žalą sveikatai, atgrasė aukštesnį intelektą turinčius žmonės nuo rūkymo. :) Man tai kažkodėl atrodo natūralu - kam aš turiu save žaloti ir dar už tai mokėti pinigus.
Žodžiu keista knyga. Daugiau nepatiko, nei patiko :)
Žodžiu keista knyga. Daugiau nepatiko, nei patiko :)
December 7, 2017
The book was very interesting from an evolutionary psychologist's perspective on intelligence. I like how he goes into the different issues associated with high intelligence. The book also covers the validity of IQ tests and how genetics and environment effect IQ. He also delves into the different areas of beliefs, whether it be social or religious, and the typical effect the different levels of intelligence will have on those.
June 3, 2020
A very good and controversial read. Have read it many years ago and will read it again. It is true that not everybody can have a high IQ and there are IQ thresholds. Just as not everyone can become a pilot or a pro basketball player. Some races have it more genetically, that makes them talented in certain fields and sometimes the truth is not politically correct. Not recommended for snow flakes that can’t handle the truth.
April 11, 2018
Not very bright book. Point is made in chatper one and then author keeps going on and on about same stuff in different but similar concepts. Could be a good magazine 5 pages article and more than is a waste of time.
August 2, 2019
Knyga, kurioje pažvelgiama į proto/intelekto prigimtį, neigiami įvairūs nusistovėję mitai, vienas iš tokių, kad žmogaus protas yra lygus jo vertei. Keliami ir atsakomi klausimai: kokią įtaką protas daro prioritetams ir vertybėms? Kodėl ateistai intelektualesni už tikinčiuosius?..
March 17, 2023
*TRIGGER WARNING* The Intelligence Paradox perfectly explains, with cool graphs and hard facts, why both extremes of the IQ spectrum have a hard time fitting into society. This book also looks into racial differences on the Intelligence spectrum, that is why some people might get salty reading.
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