Kanazawa postscript

When I caught up with Satoshi Kanazawa during an evening poster session Friday, I put the question to him: Can you have high mating intelligence without using it?

He said no, and equated mating intelligence with cheater detection. Could you truthfully say you're good at detecting cheaters but also acknowledge being routinely taken in?

Says I, "Does that mean that you have to have a wife and kids to have high mating intelligence?"

"No," says he, "but you would need to have a lot of partners."

OK, fine. But what about for women? Having many partners is not typically seen as a genius strategy for women, so his position would mean that the only women who have high mating intelligence are indeed the ones who have a husband - or other long-term mate - and kids.

I find this implausible, to say the least, but I also think Kanazawa is onto something when he posits that mating intelligence is not the be-all Intelligence - a position held by others.

That doesn't mean I'm sold on Kanazawa's proposition that general intelligence, mating intelligence and all the other intelligences are non-hierarchical, though.