PEOPLE who are more intelligent are more likely to be atheists and politically liberal, the evolutionary psychologist Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, of the London School of Economics, suggests.

Writing in the latest edition of the Social Psychological Quarterly Online, Dr Kanazawa says that more intelligent people are better able to cope with new ideas that did not exist when their forebears evolved in the savanna because evolution has adapted them to cope with the un­expected. He calls this theory the Savanna Principle.

Religion, Dr Kanazawa writes, is not something that is “evolu­tionarily novel”; it is something universal, and is probably the by-product of an evolutionary paranoia about danger lurking behind bushes. Those who were paranoid lived longer, because they were ready for any danger.

“The human brain may be biased to perceive intentional forces (the hand of God at work) behind a wide range of natural physical phenomena whose exact causes are unknown . . . religion and religiosity has an evolu­tionary origin. It is evolutionarily familiar and natural to believe in God and evolutionary novel not to be religious.”

Dr Kanazawa found that out of 1500 distinct cultures in The Encyclo­paedia of World Cultures, only 19 contained any reference to athe­ism, and those were all in former Com­munist societies. “The hypo­thesis would therefore suggest that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheist than less intelligent individuals.”

Of the Add Health study of adolescent health in the United States in 2002, Dr Kanazawa writes: “The higher the intelligence of Add Health respondents in junior-high and high school, the less religious they grow up to be in early adulthood.” The study supported the hypothesis.

In another study, conducted by General Social Surveys in the US over the past 30 years, there was a similar link: “More intelligent individuals have a significantly weaker belief in God.” It also said they were “signifi­c­antly more liberal”, in the sense that they were genuinely concerned for the welfare of people with whom they had no family or social links — some­thing that was also “evolutionarily novel”.

The hypothesis also predicted that intelligent men would be faithful to their partners because that was novel, but intelligent women would not necessarily be faithful because it was not novel. “Throughout human evolutionary history, men have mated with several women while women have mated with only one man.”

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