We can begin by thinking about that thin layer of students of the highest cognitive ability who are being funneled through rarefied college environments, whence they go forth to acquire eventually not just the good life but often an influence on the life of the nation. They are coming of age in environments that are utterly atypical of the nation as a whole.1
As I grow older and am exposed to a greater variety of my fellow Americans, I come to dislike America more and more. In large part, I think the explanation is to be found in a sudden exposure to people who strike me as disturbingly and even reprehensibly stupid. As a child growing up in a private school with a student body so intelligent and well-educated that it made the Columbia student body seem to me to be filled with lazy morons, disbelief in evolution was as unthinkable as doubting the laws of arithmetic. It was not until I had met men and women with doubts about evolution that I began to realize that the doubts were to be explained as products of low relative intelligence and low levels of education. Americans on average are an exceptionally poorly educated bunch when you compare them to the citizens of other First World nations. For a long time, I did not realize this because I had been only exposed to America’s brightest and best-educated.
I personally think one of the most interesting statistics that could be taken is to find the correlation between belief in evolution and high IQ.
- Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray : The Bell Curve : The Emergence Of A Cognitive Elite↩