Kanazawa proposes what he calls the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” as an explanation for the “origin of values and preferences” in human mental and social life. The hypothesis consists of a combination of the “Savanna Principle” and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence previously proposed by the author that suggests general intelligence evolved as a “domain-specific adaptation for the domain of evolutionarily novel, nonrecurrent problems” such as flash floods, drought, and lightning strikes (35). The Savanna Principle is the idea that the “brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment” (the African savanna). The combination of these concepts leads Kanazawa to propose the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” that the constraints placed on human understanding by the ancestral environment should be stronger among those with less general intelligence and also that more intelligent people should be “better able to comprehend and deal with evolutionarily novel . . . entities and situations than less intelligent individuals” (36).

In order to test his hypothesis, Kanazawa conducted two studies, one of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Study 1) and the other from the General Social Surveys (Study 2) in order to identify any correlation between general intelligence and three “evolutionarily novel values.” While Kanazawa offers political liberalism and monogamy as well, we will look at what he has to say about the third novel value, atheism. more at:http://spq.sagepub.com/content/73/1/33.abstract