It is an old idea that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives.

John Stuart Mill, the eminent 19th-century philosopher, famously called conservatives “the stupid party.” Conservatives are often maligned in popular culture as reactionist buffoons, represented by Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert. And recently I was shown a study written by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa from Psychology Today claiming, with the might of Science behind it, that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives.

His research finds that those who identify themselves as “very liberal” have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, while “very conservative” kids only score a 94.8.

He even goes so far as to say that the perceived liberal dominance of mainstream institutions is the way it should be. “[Liberals] control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives,” Kanazawa opined, “and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of modern life.”

Aside from the many flaws apparent in the research (the sample size and margin for error are not posted, it doesn’t specify where the children were tested — explaining the problems with this study would take another column), its fatal flaw is that the statement itself — liberals are more intelligent than conservatives — does not make any sense.

Political ideology is not a stationary variable — countless people have changed their political preference even multiple times throughout their lives. Is a liberal — say, playwright David Mamet — who becomes a conservative all of a sudden dumb? Is a conservative who becomes a liberal all of a sudden smart?

Besides the frequent malleability of people’s political philosophy, Kanazawa’s definition of liberalism leaves much to be desired.

Liberalism, as opposed to conservatism, he says, is “the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others.”

So, according to Kanazawa, people who lack concern for others and give less for the welfare of others are conservatives.

It should go without saying that this is bunk.

It was only with Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency that liberalism became synonymous with big government, and even FDR campaigned in 1932 on criticizing Hoover’s “reckless and extravagant” spending. FDR’s running mate, John Nance Garner, claimed that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.”

Were liberals and conservatives of equal intelligence until the New Deal, whereby liberals shot by their conservative counterparts?

It is folly to claim that either conservatives or liberals are more intelligent than the other. People aren’t born either liberal or conservative; they believe what they believe based on family, the community, church, school, their experiences and their own thoughts.

Political leanings are not an intrinsic value.

Liberals love to jump all over any type of “scientific data” that shows them to be better than conservatives, and vice versa. This sort of thing solves nothing, and it only serves to further alienate each side from the other.

Instead, each side should simply have it out in the policy arena without resorting to ad hominem attacks on the other side’s intelligence or character.