And sometimes, it’s even interesting and thoughtful! So I thought I’d put it here for your considerations as well.
I’m a Canadian who’s been reading your blog for a couple of years.
Anyway, I have some questions regarding your take on Dawkins view of the intelligence of religious people, as seen in his TED talk about militant atheism (link below). I’m emailing you because I trust your opinion as a developmental biologist. Also, let me establish that I’m an atheist; I’m not emailing you to rant about how Dawkins hurt my feelings, etc. I am concerned about what I see is a very glib attitude towards the mental worth of millions and millions of people.
I feel that Dawkins’s argument is convincing at first blush. He provides statistical evidence for there being a correlation between atheism and IQ. The data also confirms my bias: I generally think of religious beliefs as unfounded things which can only be held thoughtlessly; i.e., the religious person doesn’t think too deeply about what he or she believes, which may indicate poor thinking skills.
But I think the issue is way more complicated than Dawkins makes out. For one, it raises the question of causal relationship between IQ and atheism is: does having a high IQ cause one’s atheism? Or does atheism cause one to have a high IQ? I could imagine it going either way. And how important is IQ at this point in time anyway?
Lastly: am I wrong to sense a somewhat bigoted attitude towards the intelligence of the religious? Imagine if Dawkins was instead talking about white people instead of atheists; his comments would then sound horribly bigoted and most people would (rightly) tell him that he’s oversimplifying the issues. Imagine if he said that in almost every paper it was found that there was a significant positive correlation between being white and having a high IQ. Or imagine if he pointed out that there are more white people in the National Academy of Sciences than black people. Then, imagine if he suggested that because of these facts, white people really should be in charge of the country. But because Dawkins is targeting the religious with these arguments, many atheists will probably accept them just because Dawkins is presenting them.
I’m sure many people, including yourself, would point out that there are big cultural differences between being a white person in America and a black person in America; on average, white people have access to better healthcare, better food, better schools, more money for college, less discrimination etc., etc. But isn’t this true also for religious people? I know that America has large under class, and I suspect that you’ll find more religious people among it than in the middle and upper classes.
Now, I’m not saying that Dawkins is being dishonest. I’ll accept that atheists make up a larger percentage of both those with higher IQs and those who belong to the NAS. My issue is the notion that religious people are just dumber than atheists. I don’t think this is true; I think that religious people are more likely to come from disadvantaged background, and (for a host of reasons) this means they do more poorly on IQ tests, which are largely a measure of educational achievement. To my mind, this means that in terms of promoting atheism, reducing poverty could be just as important as keeping creationists out of schools.
Here’s that TED talk.
Funny thing about it: it’s a half hour long, and I almost entirely agree with all of it. The part my correspondent is discussing starts at about 15:40, and is a segment about 3 minutes long, so we can set an upper bound to the extent of my disagreement with Dawkins to about 10% — but even that is too high, because I also agree with the facts he lays out. Yes, more highly ranked scientists are godless. A college education does seem to have a negative correlation with religiosity. But I disagree with the interpretation for a couple of reasons.
One is that IQ is a terrible metric. It always has been. It does not measure intelligence, actually; the tests are so laden with cultural values that it is actually more of a test of assimilation and acceptance of a certain set of social priorities. Which, I suppose, is fine, if your goal is to advance individuals into a civil service that maintains the status quo.
It has become a tool of racists. How can anyone claim that the average IQ of Africans (and already we’re talking absurdities, since Africa is a huge and diverse place) is 70, and then argue that the average intelligence of Africans is somehow south of being barely able to live independently? It’s nonsense. It’s completely invalidated by any observation of any group of Africans. All it really means is that Africans are not Americans.
So when someone tells me that religious people have lower intelligence than atheists, I translate that immediately into “Well-off people with some economic stability and access to higher education are less dependent on the social safety net religion provides.” That’s all it really means.
That successful scientists are even less likely to be religious is also explained, not by their greater intelligence, but by the fact that science is a social system — it selects for and reinforces its own set of values that tend to exclude faith. Faith is very anti-scientific — spend a few years planning experiments and trying to get funded, and you learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t.
(The creationists will love me for saying this, but science is an ideology. It just happens to be a powerful, successful, and useful ideology.)
(And the libertarians will hate me. I was just dismissing someone on Twitter who tried to claim his rationality was ideology-free. Sorry, guy, valuing rationality is an ideological position.)
My point is that most atheists did not reach their conclusions because they reasoned their way into them or are generally the smartest people around — rather, we are imbued by our cultural upbringing to place a high value on, for instance, mathematics and science and evidence-based decision-making. We got that first, and then using those priorities, we built an understanding of how the world works that does not involve a god. And people with those values do well in college and get jobs in science and technology.
Similarly, religious people did not arrive at their conclusions because they’re somehow intellectually deficient or incapacitated. They were brought up with a different set of values, which we can’t actually say are all bad — the extremes are, they can lead to the Westboro Baptists, for instance, but we can say the same of science, which in the extremes can lead to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. But the religious can be just as intelligent as the godless.
What this all means is that bringing more people to atheism and science isn’t about making them smarter — if we’re relying on a magical elevation of global intelligence to win, we’re doomed. We have to appreciate that this isn’t a battle of wits, but instead a conflict of values. You’re not going to convince people that they ought to abandon tradition and faith because the statistics show that our side has a higher average IQ.
We have to go right to the roots of people’s beliefs — we have to raise children to appreciate that science is cool and powerful and fun and life affirming, so that they think it’s a good idea to figure out math. We have to teach kids that when Side A presents solid evidence for their position, and Side B presents a powerful emotional argument for theirs, that they ought to give A a higher score in the debate.
Again, that’s about values. The kid who picks Side B is not being stupid, they are making a choice built on what they personally consider important.
I also think it would be a gigantic tactical mistake to build a case on the idea that kids should pick A because otherwise a man with a Ph.D. will tell them they’re not very smart and have a low IQ (I don’t think Dawkins was saying that at all, though). That leads to a different set of values: one that prioritizes authority. I think we’ve had quite enough of that in Western civilization already.
So I agree with my correspondent. You want to increase the number of atheists in the country? Make people more economically secure, give them access to education, build up equality and tear down inequities of all kinds, and promote positive rational values. Give people choices.
Now my agenda is revealed: that progressive, liberal values are exactly what creates more independence from religion, so that’s what we ought to be promoting.
“It has become a tool of racists.”
Surely you mean “started as”. Wasn’t it invented by Galton so he could gather evidence of the inferiority of the lesser races? It was only later it was used to check childhood development.
Does that mean a) nothing of value was lost, b) you couldn’t care less, or c) both?
It’s both amazingly important for us (not just as athiests/scientists/whatever but as humans) what our ideology is and the implications of it, and nearly impossible to achieve properly. Ideology is fundamentally subconscious, and almost axiomatic. In the same way that you can’t really justify that 2+2 = 4 other than to simply say “that is how addition works” (because, in systems of mathematical logic, the definition of addition generally is an axiom), it’s seemingly impossible to justify “science is good because it works”, or “everyone should be happy” – it just seems like that is how it ought to be, right?
This does mean that it’s impossible to objectively evaluate a “good” ideology. We can, however, objectively compare performance on different things – we can say “because of scientific values, we live longer” and be pretty accurate. The fact that scientific values perform well on a lot of those evaluations is one reason to favor our values system, but then again, valuing that kind of evaluation isn’t a given…
So basically, ideology is a formless, shifting Cthuloid mess and I’m not quite sure where I was going with this, except that I really wish we had better ways of dealing with this.
The effects of adequate childhood nutrition and preventing lead poisoning are pretty magical, so maybe not that doomed.
How often do religious people lose their religion through reason? My parents’ generation became atheists because the priesthood lost their authority. Since their rhetoric was a pure appeal to authority, it was a fatal blow, and an entire generation moved on.
David Gerard@1: No, I’m pretty sure PZ is right. IIRC, the original IQ test was developed for diagnosing kids with learning disabilities. It became a tool of racists when it was used for large scale screening, first of soldiers, then of immigrants.
Galton may have been interested in intelligence testing, but he didn’t develop anything that might considered ancestral to today’s tests.
Speaking as a non-scientist: intelligence seems to me to be an extremely complicated thing. And it starts with the fact that when we talk about intelligence, we rarely define it. (It does amuse me that Dawkins, who clearly believes himself to be a brilliant thinker, is in the habit of making sweeping statements without defining the terms.) If we define intelligence as an ability to absorb information and use it to solve problems (speaking roughly), then it does not necessarily imply independence of thought, skepticism towards authority, or indeed, an absence of religious belief. And conversely, the fact that a person harbors an inherent distrust of authority does not necessarily mean he has superior abilities in the problem-solving field. To state that believers are of necessity less intelligent than athesists also ignores the fact that there are strong EMOTIONAL incentives to religious belief, including the need to cope with one’s mortality and the need to belong to a supportive community. Surely, the remarkable tendency of highly intelligent people to join cults has been noted.
Almost entirely agreeable. One minor technical point, though:
Actually, rationality is a-priori desirable, as I explain here
http://maximum-entropy-blog.blogspot.com/2013/09/is-rationality-desirable.html
(I say minor technical point, but actually once this is realized, it opens up a huge arena of important philosophical development – hence my bringing it up.)
This in no way implies the validity of libertarianism, though.
Also, how one implements one’s rationality can be ideologically driven (e.g. via how one estimates one’s utility function).
@6 inquisitiveraven: yeah, the child-testing is ancestral to the test as we know it.
As Hawking notes, “people who boast about their IQ are losers.” The loudest “race realists” I know of (the “human biodiversity” crowd) are for the most part people of nearly no life achievements, so they brag about their IQ and (no foolin’) SAT scores. Because it’s just ::::BIOTRUTHS:::: that Bay Area libertarians are inherently superior to the blacks and the poors.
@8 aggressivePerfector: yeah, the problem is people who go “I’m a rationalist” and then behave as though that makes them less of a dumbarse like the rest of us humans. (Dumbarse and intelligence being orthogonal. Indeed, you need some smarts to be a serious dumbarse.)
Christianity clearly states that it requires a child-like faith in it’s beliefs.
I see that there are different kinds of religious people around me.
There are those with that child-like faith who don’t seem to think on a very high level at all. Some of them are like my daughter’s mother-in-law – a very broken person who has several emotional problems which she seems to be able to hide with her devout faith. She is a perfect example of the sort of person that Dawkins was referring to – child-like and not too bright.
There are those who use religion as simply a social outlet or networking tool. This was me when I attended church regularly. The sermons and teachings just washed over me without sticking. I was there for the fun of singing in the choir and socializing with friends.
There are those who go through the motions of going to church just because of social pressure, as in being dragged there by the spouse. My late cousin was a perfect example of this.
The dangerous ones are the ones who are educated and intelligent, but use religion as a way to gain power over others. I often wonder if these people really know that it’s all BS, but find it useful. These are the pedophile priests, the politicians like Jindal, and the ones that I find the most frightening, the medical professionals like Ben Carson and Donald Hilton here in San Antonio.
I’m sure that there are other types of religious people. I’m certainly not qualified to talk about this, but these are the religious people that I’ve observed in my life.
He provides statistical evidence for there being a correlation between atheism and IQ
And IQ is a statstical correlation between certain social outcomes and having certain other skills and knowledge. IQ tests measure something: how well you do on IQ tests.
Quetelet (who also brought you BMI, through a long roundabout route) was originally careful to not claim it was a test that determined intelligence; it was originally a test to see if certain social outcomes correlated with good performance on the test. The whole IQ test thing went horribly wrong after that.
Well, the Tuskeegee syphyllis study was not actually an experiment, it was an observational natural history study. And it was also pretty stupid — it didn’t have any scientific justification. So I wouldn’t say it was the scientific world view or ideology that led to it, just racism.
Aaaaand I got Adolphe Quetelet and Binet confused. Damn! It’s too early to blame alcohol so I’ll just have to blame this cup of tea, here.
To numerobis (@5):
I gave up on whatever religious beliefs i held because I realized the only way to keep holding them required too much intellectual gymnastics and special pleading to reconcile them with anything that had actual evidence. I am still curious about how that belief system came to be, when did people start believing what and why – and what evidence do we have for any of that history.
But then I was not raised within a religious community in the sense that this is meant in the US, nor was i raised living a particular religious lifestyle. IOW religion was entangled with my national identity, but wasn’t something I lived day to day.
I wouldn’t say it was the scientific world view or ideology that led to it, just racism.
Let’s be fair: it was an attempt by racists to scientize their racism; to justify it with evidence. There has been a lot of that. (Stephen Jay Gould’s “The mismeasure of man” is worth a read) It failed. The important takeaway is that attempts to support racism scientifically have failed. Not that science has not been used in support of racism. Various racists have tried that.
By the way, I read a fun thing the other day about twin studies (identical twins raised separately) score more closely on Dance/Dance/Revolution than non-twins. It’s sort of like the whole IQ thing: it doesn’t show that there’s a genetic predisposition for “rythm” but perhaps some of the elements that make up what we think of as “rythm” may have some genetic component.
I have to disagree with his statement that science can lead to things like the Tuskegee experiments. It was not the science that led to those experiments it was racism pure and simple. Just as Josef Mengele’s experiments were guided more by bigotry than science.
uncle frogy
And the libertarians will hate me. I was just dismissing someone on Twitter who tried to claim his rationality was ideology-free.
When libertarians make that claim, it is instantly undermined by libertarians’ piss-poor grasp of what rationality really is. They love to preach and pretend they’re the ONLY rational people in the room, but they really don’t have any sort of rationality, ideology-free or not.
numerobis@5:
I don’t have data for you, just an anecdote. I grew up with four Lutheran pastors in my family, including my father. It took a lot to break away from that, and for me it probably wouldn’t have happened without crap-loads of science-fiction books slowly instilling a respect for critical thinking and the scientific method into my parochial-school-trained mind.
So for me, it was through reason, but I cannot claim to have gotten there on my own. First came respect for critical thinking and the scientific method, then there was a whole lot of applying critical thinking and dealing with the crushing guilt of feeling like I was betraying my father.
I don’t think anybody could have rationalized me into atheism when I was at my most religious. I had to get there on my own, but I could only do that after I had the mental tools to think critically about the topic. I wasn’t any more stupid then than I am now, I just wasn’t in the habit of applying critical thought to an area of my life I had been trained rigorously since birth to take on faith.
Incidentally, I didn’t read any atheism-specific books at all until after I had decided that’s what I am. I couldn’t be caught with that sort of thing!
I’m one of those people who had a high-fautin’ IQ, and by any measure I’m an abject failure at life. Every aspect of it.
Emotionally, relationship-wise, career-wise, accomplishing goals, taking care of myself, supporting myself, reproducing. I’m an evolutionary dead-end.
But one thing is, I’m pretty good at taking tests. IQ tests (apparently) and others. I have passed final exams for courses I not only never took but didn’t know what the subject of.
IQ tests are a measure at how good you are at IQ tests. Apparently I am fairly good at taking IQ tests.
It has meant exactly jack shit in real-life application.
and as you can see my grammar even sucks anymore.
Marcus – my understanding is that studies on twins-raised-separately have a very small sample size, because the interval between (realization that (twins raised separately) can be scientifically useful) and (realization that it’s inhumane to forcibly split twins and raise them separately without even letting them know that the other exists) was very short.
And the evidence seems to agree with you. There is a strong correlation between poverty and religiosity.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/religions-correlation-with-poverty/
http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/worldwide-many-see-belief-in-god-as-essential-to-morality/
Ooh. Was it also philosophy-free?
Given the high-level difficulty of understanding much theology and the amazing creativity involved in retrofitting some religious views into new discoveries in reality (“and it’s always meant that!”), being religious might sometimes require a kind of sheer genius.
PZ Myers wrote:
This suggests that if one wants to increase the number of atheists in our society, then it would not be logical to support the CPAC conservative politics.
Maybe someone should tell David Silverman?
You are presuming that DS is listening. He is deaf to criticism.
If I were to think of anything to add, Amused, (#7) said all of it and completely.
I suppose I could add just one small thing: Spend enough time among both overtly religious and openly atheist crowds and there is no way you could conclude that atheists are just “smarter than” religious people. Both sets span the range and include, I think, those with a preternatural propensity for believing what they’re told as well as wish thinking (even!) — just focused on different facts and different wishes.
(also, FFS, read her blog! All of it.)
Jafafa Hots
Oh. *looks in internet mirror* You’re me. Or I’m you.
Except I did reproduce. And whatever I had in my head that was so “smart” for so many years — according to the people around me, because apparently all it takes to be smart in my area is always having a book with you and knowing how to use big words — well, something eated it. :p
True, correlation does not equal causation. In this case I don’t think the relationship is much of a mystery. An increase in education is related to a decrease in belief in gods, religion, and supernaturalism in general–and an increase in tendency toward atheism. IQ tests are tests of English and math skills, which increase with education. The relationship is pretty clear. It would be dishonest to say that atheists are “smarter” than religious people in every way, especially based on a test of two specific types of mental skills–but atheists do tend to be more educated, and even lacking formal education, atheists tend to be better read (emphasis on “in general”). That may be because we don’t believe that we have to spend most of our reading time on any one book.
Marcus Ranum @ 12, quoting PZ’s Canadian correspondent:
However (not that I claim you’re doing it), it would be illegitimate to conclude from
(A) atheism has a positive correlation with high IQ
and
(B) high IQ has a positive correlation with social outcome X
that
(C) atheism has a positive correlation with social outcome X.
That is, “has a positive correlation with” is not a transitive relation (in any system with 2 or more degrees of freedom). For instance, if u=(1,0), v=(1/2,sqrt(3)/2), and w=(–1/2,sqrt(3)/2), then the correlation coefficient of u with v is 1/2, that of v with w is also 1/2, but that of u with w is –1/2.
I’m not trying to be obnoxiously didactic; I just like to point this out (since many people do seem to believe that “has a positive correlation with” is transitive; including, according to my Trusted Sources In The Belly of the Beast, many psychologists).
Nope, it’s the other way around: the Sardinian-turned-French psychologist Alfred Binet invented circa 1905 the precursor to the IQ test in order to childhood development, and then saw his work hijacked by eugenists and racial determinists who wanted to justify their desire to treat minorities and plebs like barely sentient cattle and fucktoys.
Binet himself didn’t held such views and openly criticized those who wanted to proclaim that intelligence was intrinsically biological and hereditary, but was completely ignored by his contemporaries.
Intelligence doesn’t counter the problem of GIGO. It just makes the in to out process go faster.
PZ, you make claims about what “the tests” are like, but what you describe doesn’t sound anything like any test I’m familiar with. Sure, simply agreeing to take a test, and understanding what a test is*, and doing your best to get the answers right – all of that shows you’ve accepted certain cultural values (or at least understand that they exist, and decide to act as if you accept them, because you think it’s in your best interest). But the same is true of things like wearing clothes in public. I guess that’s also all about maintaining the status quo. Some tests or parts of tests rely on knowledge and skills most people acquire in school, which limits their usefulness when someone has little or no schooling, but that just means you need to check that. Acquiring and retaining knowledge is an important cognitive ability, and I don’t see how you could test that in a culture-free way. There’s no such thing as a culture-free IQ test anyway, and there never will be.
The idea that Africans have an average IQ of 70 is absurd not just for the reasons you mention, but (as anyone with a 2 hour intro to IQ tests course should be able to tell you) because IQ tests don’t work like that. It’s not a valid use of any test, so the results are not valid either. They measure differences within a population, not between populations, and the population mean is always 100. The average IQ of Africans is (or rather, would be, if the population of the entire continent was so homogenous that you could treat it as a single population ) 100 by definition. If people in country a are better at visual pattern recognition than people in country b, that just means you need to get more items right to get a score of 100. Sure, you can use the same test with the same norms in different cultures, but you won’t know what it is you’re measuring.
Intelligence can’t be measured directly. Using IQ tests to measure intelligence is a bit like using results in specific sports to measure a “being-good-at-sports” ability that you believe exists. The results will be far from perfect, and will depend on which sport (-s) you’re looking at, but that doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
Those of you who get high scores on IQ tests but fail at life – does the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” mean anything to you?
The cliché about IQ tests only testing how good you are at IQ tests is not just silly, it’s dangerous. It leads to kids being blamed for failing, because obviously they’re just not trying hard enough. Ten years later they show up in my office with depression/social phobia/a cronic pain disorder or two, in addition to an IQ below 70.
* IQ tests are made for WEIRD populations, trying to test people from completely different cultures e. g. analphabets from rural Somalia, is mostly pointless. If you get a score in the normal range you can be reasonably certain their general cognitive ability is at least at that level – if you don’t, you don’t know more than before you tested them.
IQ doesn’t even measure what it purports to measure. Intelligence is a pretty nebulous concept, but the definition that makes most sense to me is that it is your ability to use what knowledge you possess to solve problems. It is therefore distinct from education. But in order to gain any meaningful measurement of such a thing, each test would have to be individually tailored to take into account the applicant’s previous level of education, and the IQ test in it’s current state is not. It assumes not only a quite high base-level of education, but an academic, westernized education. The questions are therefore biased, and what they’re really measuring is your level of education in that particular system of education.
And there, I think, is the connection. Education in maths and the sciences, which academic western education places quite high value on, will, I think, generally lead people towards Atheism because it explains an awful lot of things which people previously explained with “Goddidit”. Less education in maths and the sciences correlates with religiosity as a result, and also correlates with low IQ due to the biases inherent within the test. People who claim that Atheists are naturally smarter are fucking about with causality in an effort to make themselves feel superior.
If you mean this in the partisan and demonstrably wrong “facts skew left” way, then you’re not valuing rationality, you’re valuing progressive politics.
If you value rationality then you’re open to facts, contradictory evidence, and the possibility that your political positions might be wrong. Unfortunately this is a phenomenon rarely encountered among the far left.