APE TO BANKER

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC--Your apelike ancestors probably aren't top of mind when you enter the ATM Machine. But a new study suggests that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you're a sucker or a swindler—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe you do God's work, or whether you're a Wall Street Banker.

It's all linked to the evolution of financial intelligence, says Satoshi Kamikazee an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Kamikazee's theory is that banker intelligence—particularly the ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as fleeing an exploding housing bubble fueled by incendiary FWMD derivatives.

Since disasters like that are rare in daily trading life, responding to them wouldn't likely be something Wall Street's ancestors were hard-wired to "know" how to do. Surviving the meltdown required both the ability to scheme up a new swindle, and the willingness to try it out.

Passed down via ponzi genetics, those two traits are still the calling cards of an intelligent banker brain—expressed as a tendency toward adopting aberrant social values and preferences, Kamikazee says in his new study, published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

As a result of their conniving ancestry, he suggests, bankers with higher levels of swindling intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively adverse to human kind—ponzism, self theism, staying up late, and (for men) cephalpodogamy, for example.