Kathryn, Andrew: It happens that I saw Kathryn’s post just after reading a symposium piece in the June 27 Chronicle of Higher Education with P.Z. Myers as one of the contributors. The topic of the symposium is: “Are religious people stupid?” It’s online here, but subscriber-only.
I’ve extracted Myers’ contribution below. You need to know that the occasion for the symposium is a paper in the academic journal Intelligence by Richard Lynn, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Ulster, and two co-authors. Prof. Lynn’s paper argues that there is a strong correlation between high levels of intelligence and disbelief in God. OK, here is Myers’ contribution to the symposium:
Paul Z. Myers, associate professor of biology, University of Minnesota at Morris: I’m afraid I don’t trust it [i.e. Lynn’s paper] at all. The author is the infamous racist, Richard Lynn, and it carries all the baggage of his peculiar notions of genetic determinism and narrow views on the significance of IQ.
I don’t think the religious are necessarily stupid, and I most definitely do not believe they are born stupid. I do believe they are saddled with a set of foolish misconceptions that can throttle their intellectual development and send them careering off into genuinely weird sets of beliefs, but this doesn’t make them stupid. I also think that IQ tests are written by people who promote an implicitly scientific perspective (which is a good thing!), and it’s therefore not surprising that a group in which a significant fraction of its membership actively reject science will do poorly on such tests.
While I can see where accepting the handicap of faith might lead to poor performance on non-faith-based tests and scientific thinking, I reject Lynn’s usual premise of a biological basis for such ability.
[Me] Prof. Myers illustrates the paradox, which I have noted here and elsewhere, that the implications of biology are just as terrifying to the Left as to the Right, when human beings are the subject of discussion. Or as Steve Sailer neatly put it: “The Right believes in biology, but not in evolution; the Left believes in evolution, but not in biology.”
Poor old Chuck gets it from both sides.
