Five Before Chaos

Interesting new theory in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly that will make conservative spittle fly:

The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. Some examples:

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

So what does this mean?

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals…

“Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Now if someone could just come up with a theory to explain teabaggers and the Vermont secession movement, that’d be real progress.

Actually, no, as they’re just fucking crazy.

UPDATE: PZ sez this guy’s a hack, writes for Psychology Today.

A.A. Gill from Vanity Fair paid a visit to the notorious Creation Fred Flintstone Museum in Kentucky:

But we should cut the creationists a little slack, because every new bit of evidence, every discovery, is a nightmare for them. Take the ark. The big-boat business poses all sorts of questions. But, again, they’ve got answers. There are models and plans and layouts of the vessel. You can walk through a part of the hull. There’s biblical carpentry and weather reports. And the dinosaurs are on board. (They were probably small ones, the museum helpfully adds.) But recently scientists found a new giant rat and a fanged frog in Papua, New Guinea, so now some Noah-ists have to redesign the amphibian quarters. The rats probably sort themselves out. O.K., so you get everybody aboard, 10 million creatures, times two, without the neighbors’ noticing. Where did the water come from? You have to flood the whole world. Did they import water from the Scientologists? No: it came from underground. There is a great reservoir, presumably for flooding purposes, under our feet. I assume that’s where it went back to. Why don’t we drill for it to water Phoenix? (By the way, the flood is where we get fossils from. That’s all the dead stuff, caught in mud.) When the waters abated, the animals got off, stretched, and walked around the world eating one another’s children. I’m not making this up. Nobody’s making this up. This is what happened.

As PZ aptly observed:

It’s also ugly, cheesy, and stupid. People often try to excuse faith by claiming it inspired a lot of great art…but here is the evidence that god is dead. All his rotting corpse seems to inspire any more is cartoon kitsch. And Christian rock.

I really wish the Rapture would hurry up and get here so I can go through these peoples’ things and grab the good stuff (what that would be, other than money, who knows? – certainly not Left Behind Books and Christian rock CD’s).

I was AWOL the last few days, as some of you might have noticed. I was in the Catskills, a place I used to go all the time when I was younger, and I’m glad to say, it hasn’t changed much. While there, I climbed (for probably the 5th time) Overlook Mtn., just outside of Woodstock (and mentioned in the liner notes of The Band’s seminal “Music from Big Pink” album). On top of Overlook lies the ruins of a massive luxury hotel that burned down in the 1920′s. I’ll have some pics for you shortly. I also explored Hudson River State Hospital, a 160+ acre abandoned mental hospital, with buildings from back in the 1800′s when asylums truly were horrible places. Photos and movie will be coming shortly, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, while I play catch-up at home, have a quick linkdump, the refuge of the lazy blogger.

Paul Waldman’s got a great one: Can Obama Stop the War on Science?

In England or Germany or Sweden, a candidate for high office who proclaimed that he didn’t believe in evolution would risk being laughed out of the race. Yet when Brownback was asked after that debate whether his views put him outside the mainstream, he replied, “Not in America.” And he was right.

Susan Jacoby calls bullshit on those Christians who love to continually piss and moan that they’re constantly being victimized (which, in reality, means they get mad when people get tired of their proselytizing nonsense and call ‘em on it).

Lastly, in The Cult of Individualism and the Desolation of the Earth, Dave Pollard examines what really needs to be done to save the planet, something I’ve believed for a long time, and which really plagues American culture in particular:

I think we can be altruistic and collectivist and part-of-all-life-on-Earth while still being “nobody but ourselves”. But because we confuse the need to struggle against the loss of our individuality due to cultural indoctrination (a good struggle), with the need to struggle against all government and all collective and cooperative and collaborative work (a bad struggle), we get it exactly backwards: Instead of becoming ‘nobody-but-ourselves’ we become ‘ourselves apart from everybody’.

I should have the movie up by the end of the week, so check back soon.

Ok, this is the 1,000th post on FBC. Hard to believe. For those of you who have read many of the other 999, a hearty thank you goes out to you.

Anyways, I wanted to make sure that this very special post was of something of major substance: research is showing that farting lowers blood pressure:

The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

“Now that we know hydrogen sulfide’s role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension,” said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.

Design drug therapies? Beantex? Pootacor? Fartzac? Heck, eat two bowls of beans and call me in the morning. Needless to say, all of the living beings in our household (especially the dogs) are more than likely quite healthy in this regard.

Ok, here’s a thoroughly entertaining, juvenile, disgusting and informative bit about the mighty elusive giant squid. Don’t watch while eating. (h/t to Pharyngula)

Must must must watch. Perhaps this is what Huckabee’s science standards would be like (h/t to Pharyngula):