Satoshi Kanazawa

Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD born November 16, 1962  is a controversial Japanese evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics. His research uses evolutionary psychology to analyze social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology. An open letter signed by sixty-eight evolutionary psychologists states that "He has repeatedly been criticised by other academics in his field of research for using poor quality data, inappropriate statistical methods and consistently failing to consider alternative explanations for his results.

Academic criticism

Kanazawa's theories on race and intelligence are controversial. Kanazawa has argued that Asian cultural traditions and/or character inhibit Asian scientific creativity and that "political correctness" is a bigger threat to American evolutionary psychology than religious fundamentalism. He has been accused of promoting "racist stereotypes". In 2006 Kanazawa published a paper suggesting that the poor health of people in some nations is the result not of poverty, but of lower intelligence. In a letter to the editors regarding Kanazawa's claim that attractive people are more likely to have daughters, Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman points out that a correct interpretation of the regression coefficients in Kanazawa's analysis is that attractive people are 8% more likely to have girls, an error that Kanazawa acknowledges. Gelman argues that Kanazawa's analysis does not convincingly show causality, because of possible endogeneity as well as problematic interpretations of statistical significance in multiple comparisons. While Kanazawa claims that the former error is "merely linguistic" and that he addressed the latter two in his initial article,Gelman maintains that his original criticism remains valid.

In the British Journal of Health Psychology George Ellison wrote that the theory is based on flawed assumptions, questionable data, inappropriate analysis and biased interpretations. Ellison wrote that Kanazawa mistook statistical associations for evidence of causality and falsely concluded that populations in sub-Saharan Africa are less healthy because they are unintelligent and not because they are poor. Kevin Denny wrote similar criticisms regarding the IQ data and stated that African Americans should have similar IQs when compared to the sub-Saharan African population and that Kanazawa should have measured the distance between areas in a topographical fashion. P.Z. Myers, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, has called Kanazawa "the great idiot of social science.

Popular protests

In May 2011, popular protests against Kanazawa were provoked by a Psychology Today blog post written by him asserting that black women are less attractive and intelligent than women from other racial groups. This article was based on the opinions reported by survey takers in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health ("Add Health"), which Kanazawa claimed could be used as "objective" measures of attractiveness. The article was subsequently removed from the Psychology Today site without explanation, though Kaja Perina, Psychology Today Editor in Chief, stated that "[Psychology Today reserves] the right to remove posts for any number of reasons.  The article was condemned by various figures including fellow Psychology Today blogger Mikhail Lyubansky, London School of Economics professor Paul Gilroy, and UMM professor Paul Myers as being pseudoscientific and harmful to marginalized groups. 

On May 16, 2011, a Change.org petition was launched demanding that Psychology Today remove Kanazawa as a contributor to their website and magazine. The petition cites Kanazawa's "discredited research" and "racially biased articles."

On May 18, 2011, the University of London Union Senate, the Union's legislative body representing over 120,000 students, voted unanimously in favor of calling for a campaign for Kanazawa's dismissal. The reasons stated for this call for dismissal include flawed research and unscientific bigotry.

On May 27, 2011, Kaja Perina, Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today, issued this statement:

“Last week, a blog post about race and appearance by Satoshi Kanazawa was published–and promptly removed–from this site. We deeply apologize for the pain and offense that this post caused. Psychology Today’s mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material. Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site. We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.

Work

In 2003, in an article in the Journal of Research in Personality, he claimed to show that scientists generally made their biggest discoveries before their mid-30s, and compared this productivity curve to that of criminals.

In 2006 he published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, claiming that attractive people are 26% less likely to have male offspring.

Kanazawa has co-written three books with Alan Miller: "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire—Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do", Why Men Gamble and Women Buy Shoes: How Evolution Shaped the Way We Behave and Order by Accident: The Origins and Consequences of Conformity in Contemporary Japan. He also writes a blog entitled The Scientific Fundamentalist for Psychology Today.

Kanazawa uses the term Savanna principle: the theory that societal difficulties exist because the human brain evolved in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, a drastically different environment from today's urban, industrial society.

Commenting on the criticism directed against some evolutionary psychology theories, Kanazawa has stated that "The only responsibility that scientists have is to the truth, nothing else. Scientists are not responsible for the potential or actual consequences of the knowledge they create.

Commenting on the War on Terror, Kanazawa claimed that "there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate... We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t." He offers the following thought experiment: "Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost." Kanazawa has also argued that "conservative policies are more likely to succeed than liberal policies" and that a flat tax represents an ideal taxation system.

In March 2011, Kanazawa wrote an article titled, 'Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?' The article reads, "high-class prostitutes like Allie and Maggie have more in common with college professors, corporate executives, or poets than with the more affordable and visible members of their profession. prostitution is evolutionarily familiar, because mating is evolutionarily familiar and prostitutes (at least the classy ones) are no different from other women, whom men also have to pay – not in cash payments but in dinners and movies, gifts, flowers, chocolates, and motor oil.