THE DAILY BLADE: So Easy, A Conservative Can Do It: Part III
Yet another study "proving" that liberals are smarter (both, the second item on the page) - but this one has a twist: The researcher is a libertarian who "despises" libs. HealthDay News reports:
People who consider themselves liberals or atheists tend to have higher IQs than those who are more religious or conservative, a new study suggests. …
Young adults who identified themselves as "very liberal" had an average IQ of 106 during adolescence, compared to an average IQ of 95 for those who were "very conservative."
Young adults who identified themselves as "not at all religious" had an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identified themselves as "very religious" had an average IQ of 97.
Study author Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, explains:
Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid. 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." …
The purpose of intelligence, on the other hand, is to help humans cope with and solve novel problems. Therefore, more intelligent people are more likely to have religious and political preferences that go against the grain, such as atheism or a rejection of a higher power, and liberalism, which is provisionally defined in the study as caring about people who are unrelated to you.
One obvious flaw in Kanazawa’s reasoning is, "Concern for others not related to you could apply to any political outlook, including religious and social conservatives who donate large amounts of money to churches,” counters Ilya Somin, an associate professor of law at George Mason University.
A second obvious flaw: Both the “smart” and “dumb” people in this study were one standard of deviation or less apart in intelligence – and all of them were of average intelligence (an IQ of 90 to 110). In other words, there was no significant difference between the two groups.
Editorial Note: HealthDay reporter Jennifer Thomas gives this example of a dumb conservative: “a fan of Fox News or an avid churchgoer.” Wonder what her IQ is.
Is This One Of Those Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do?”: Part XIV
You’ve heard of a flash mob? Here’s the agrarian version: a Crop Mob. The Los Angeles Times reports that a Crop Mob is “a roving band of volunteers dedicated to helping young farmers build sustainable small farms. It's a modern version of a barn-raising, with volunteers brought together by Google and Facebook”:
Rob Jones, his boots smeared with mud, was trying to get the attention of a ragged group of young men and women dressed in jeans and work boots. They were toting shovels and rakes as they stomped across a barren field toward a plot of freshly turned earth. …
Jones and several other young, back-to-the-land enthusiasts started Crop Mob on a local biofuels farm. Nineteen volunteers showed up for the first mob in October 2008, harvesting 16,000 pounds of sweet potatoes in a few hours.
There have been 15 Crop Mobs since, each one bigger than the last as word spreads over the Internet. More than 80 volunteers dug rice paddies, cleared fields and repaired a roof on Oatis' rough little farm on a crisp Sunday last month.
Gathering once a month, the mobs have dug, weeded, mulched and cleared land for farmers across two North Carolina counties. Some mobbers are office workers and backyard gardeners. Others are striving young farmers. All are connected by social networking websites anchored, naturally, by the Crop Mob website at www.cropmob.org.
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