great time magazine article very interesting.. I'm sure you will find it provocative as conservatives. lol
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1968042,00.html?xid=rss-top-aol
The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.
But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so. (See the top 10 political gaffes of 2009.)
The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values — that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire. (See the top 10 religion stories of 2009.)
Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if — or maybe especially if — those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped up with genes for unnatural thinking.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1968042,00.html?xid=rss-top-aol#ixzz0gn0abHdC
ok at it this way, for the past 60 years, Liberals have been in charge of the Boards of Education in every major Urban area in the United States. How's that working out for you?
Many can take a class, fewer can pass it, even less can accomplish something with that knowledge.
The last couple paragraphs of the article I thought humorous, and a bit telling.
The jury may be out on whether conservatives are less intelligent than liberals, but there's evidence that they may be physically stronger. Last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a fascinating paper by Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The authors measured the strength of 343 students using weight-lifting machines at a gym. The participating students completed questionnaires designed to measure, among other things, their proneness to anger, their history of fighting and their fondness for aggression as a way to solve both individual and geopolitical problems.
Sell, Tooby and Cosmides found that men (but not women) with the most physical strength were the most likely to feel entitled to good treatment, anger easily, view themselves as successful in winning conflicts and believe in physical force as a tool for resolving interpersonal and international conflicts. Women who thought of themselves as pretty showed the same pattern of greater aggression. All of which means that if you are a liberal who believes you're smarter than conservatives, you probably shouldn't bring that up around them. You might not like them when they're angry.
Hello! It's called testosterone. Something our current government would know nothing about.
I believe Obama is a classic example of that. Maybe he's a University Graduate, but for all intents and purposes, he's a 'useful idiot' - Russians thing he's a joke. Something on Par with electing "Prince" or Jerry Lewis
I'll take WISE over SMART any day of the week. Solomon prayed for wisdom NOT intelligence. Leaders are WISE, Tyrants are SMART.
Then God said to Solomon: “Because this was in your heart, and you have not asked riches or wealth or honor or the life of your enemies, nor have you asked long life—but have asked wisdom and knowledge for yourself, that you may judge My people over whom I have made you king."
- 2 Chronicles 1:11
WISDOM is the ability to execute sound judgement in a wealth of knowledge.
