Thursday, February 25, 2010

It's An Exceedingly Rare Occurence

But I find myself in agreement with PZ Myers:

Stop patting yourselves on the back over this study

Category: Stupidity
Posted on: February 25, 2010 10:40 AM, by PZ Myers

Good grief. This ridiculous study is making the rounds of the atheist community, with its claim that liberals and atheists are smarter than conservatives and religious people. Look at the numbers!

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.

Seriously? Show me the error bars on those measurements. Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence. Show me that a 6 point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real. And then to claim that these differences are not only heritable, but evolutionarily significant…jebus, people, you can just glance at it and see that it is complete crap.

And then look at the source: Satoshi Kanazawa, the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology, the professional fantasist of Psychology Today. He's like the poster boy for the stupidity and groundlessnessof freakishly fact-free evolutionary psychology. Just ignore anything with Kanazawa's name on it.

1 comment:

Stephen R said...

Except for the the fact that IQ is pretty widely accepted as a genuine measure of intelligence, I tend to agree with the skepticism of the post (i.e. "let's see some details of how the study was done.")

However, Meyers talks about "liberals and atheists", while the passage he quotes only refers to atheism and not politics. The two are not the same.

Sincerely,
Conservative Atheist ;-)