Liberalism and Atheism Linked to Higher IQ

I have long maintained that far right and fundamentalist religion depends upon ignorance to perpetuate itself - hence why Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity are growing in uneducated parts of the world while withering in most advanced countries. Similarly, a denomination's adherence to Bible literalism has been shown to track with the overall level of education of denomination members (Episcopalians and Lutherans are more educated on average and less likely to see the Bible as inerrant and something to be taken literally). Now a study out of the London School of Economics and Political Science has correlated liberalism, being an atheist and (in men) being sexually exclusive with higher level IQ. It comes as no surprise in some way since it seems obvious that higher intelligence, logic and reasoning are mutually exclusive in terms of clinging to dogmatic religious beliefs that do not track with objective reality. It is also humorous that the fundamentalist Christians have the highest divorce and remarriage rate among believers, so they fail on this test too. Here are some highlights from CNN:
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Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
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Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger. "It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere," Kanazawa said.
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Atheism "allows someone to move forward and speculate on life without any concern for the dogmatic structure of a religion," Bailey said. "Historically, anything that's new and different can be seen as a threat in terms of the religious beliefs; almost all religious systems are about permanence," he noted.
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The study found that young adults who said they were "very conservative" had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were "very liberal" averaged 106. It also makes sense that "conservatism" as a worldview of keeping things stable would be a safer approach than venturing toward the unfamiliar, Bailey said.
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Vegetarianism, while not strongly associated with IQ in this study, has been shown to be related to intelligence in previous research, Kanazawa said. This also fits into Bailey's idea that unconventional preferences appeal to people with higher intelligence, and can also be a means of showing superiority.