Why Smart People Do More Drugs
Kevin Lovelace writes:
Evolutionary Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has recently been
publishing a version of his Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis over at
Psychology Today. His theory, amongst many other things, establishes a
connection between intelligence, novelity seeking and the consumption of
psychoactive drugs. Or, as the Atlantic Wire put it: “Smart People
Do More Drugs — Because of Evolution.” The quick version, hopefully
without boiling it down too far, is that Kanazawa believes that more
intelligent individuals are better equipped to deal with novel
situations – and in fact seek those situations out. Thus, highly
intelligent individuals are more likely to seek out experiences with
psychoactive drugs, which are essentially novelty sinks. He’s not
claiming that this behavior has a traditionally positive effect – in
fact his wording shows a pretty strong bias against psychoactive
experimentation but simply that people with high IQs are more likely to
seek these experiences out. […]
What struck me, is not that
he found proof of this tendency – eyeballing the amount of Ph.D’s in
the room the last time I tripped has me anecdotally primed for such a
conclusion – but how interestingly it matches Terence McKenna’s “Stoned
Ape” theory of human cognitive development. While history and the fields
of Anthropology or Evolutionary Biology haven’t been too kind to many
of McKenna’s theories over the years since he passed away, one that
continually strikes me as relevant – perhaps because of my own theories
of hybridization and technological development – is the Stoned Ape.
Full Story:
http://grinding.be/2010/11/05/the-return-of-the-stoned-ape/