Beauty, brains and politics

Posted Mar 1, 2010 by Laura Fiorilli

Updated Mar 1, 2010 at 03:10 PM

Time Magazine reports that various researchers are trying to sort out who’s smarter, liberals or conservatives.

I had to get past a little personal baggage to get into this story - namely, the opening quip about College Democrats and College Republicans. As a studiously nonpartisan College Journalist, I saw my share of campus clashes between the two. And don’t get me started on the disastrous romances between members of the rival clans. I witnessed far too many of those as well.

Stereotypes aren’t confined to the college population. What would the partisan media do without dividing political figures into “ugly, smug and intellectual” liberals and “pretty, belligerent and dumb” conservatives? Picture the caricatures brought to life, and you have Al Gore and Sarah Palin.

So, is there anything to it? Should be a pretty simple study - ask people about their political opinions, then check the results against an intelligence test.

But intelligence has never been easily measured, and that’s where things begin to unravel. Some researchers have attempted to correlate politics with behaviors that might have helped or hindered human survival back in our wily caveman days. Intelligence surely helped the human race survive this long. But most of evolution took place long before civilization. We had to live by the law of the jungle, building up both intelligence and brute strength, before creating the law as we know it.

Besides, if it all comes down to evolution, some of the hard-core right-wingers who read this article might dismiss it out of hand anyway. Hmm.