Okay, don’t get upset. I take all those “studies” with a healthy grain of salt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a conservatives are smarter study is out there too. And god knows, there are plenty of conservatives who are smarter than me. I know some of them, so I know they’re smarter than me.

Still, I couldn’t help but enjoy this National Geographic article. You will too if you’re a liberal person who has always had the sneaky suspicion that more liberal people tend to be more intelligent.

Kanazawa’s theory is that intelligence—particularly our ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as a sudden forest fire.

Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn’t likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to “know” how to do. Surviving the fire required both the ability to think up a new behavior, and the willingness to try it out.

Passed down via genetics, those two traits are still the calling cards of an intelligent brain—expressed as a tendency toward adopting nontraditional social values and preferences, Kanazawa says in his new study, published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

As a result of their iconoclastic ancestry, he suggests, people with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively new to human life—liberalism, atheism, staying up late, and (for men) monogamy, for example.

This tendency toward iconoclasm stems from smart people’s brains being better adapted to dealing with new situations, according to Kanazawa.

But the difference is only 11 IQ points, alas. And there are plenty of reasons to find the study and theory faulty. But you might get a kick out of it — and it’ll help you deal with all the stupid things the tea baggers and our current crop of “conservatives” say and do. They’re just not evolved enough, the poor things. You knew that, didn’t you?