British journal of health psychology
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Br J Health Psychol · May 2007
CommentMind the gap(s)... in theory, method and data: Re-examining Kanazawa (2006).
Kanazawa (2006) has put forward an evolutionarily grounded theory which claims that individuals in wealthier and more egalitarian societies live longer and stay healthier not because they are wealthier or more egalitarian but because they are more intelligent (2006: 637). The claim rests on an argument which asserts that general intelligence is a solution to evolutionarily novel problems and that most dangers to health in contemporary society are evolutionarily novel. Kanazawa also claims that this relationship does not hold in sub-Saharan Africa. ⋯ The methods used are inadequate because Kanazawa argues for causation from correlation and fails to consider alternative explanations. The IQ data are flawed for reasons to do with sample size and sampling, extrapolation and inconsistency across measures. Nor are they temporally compatible with the economic and demographic data.