aphex said:
I'm a shaven headed, patriotic, lager lout who screams at football matches and is never shy to get in somebody's face, yet am also a self-employed computer programmer who reads scientific papers and debates lefty politics in my spare time.
Violence is the result of emotional hormones in the brain, and intelligence does very little to stop or help control those hormones. There's a lad I know, who was a highly respected chemist, who is now inside for battering a guy with a baseball bat in a racially aggravated assault.
I also know people who can't write their own name, yet are some of the nicest, hardworking men who you would ever have the fortune to meet, proper gentlemen in every usage of the word.
I would imagine the stereotype stems from when Universities were only for the upper classes, and the working classes (sometimes literally) had to fight to survive. Thus the silver spoon brigade weren't 'tough' and decided that violence was 'beneath them'.
Violence is as much a part of a normal humans life as sex. It's like saying that clever people never have sex, because they are too evolved for it.
EDIT : Also, this is glossing over the whole issue of what intelligence actually is. I've always been pretty book smart and mathematical, however I struggle at things that others do well, especially artistic stuff. A running joke in my family is also that I lack 'common sense', like been able to wire a plug properly, or not having even the slightest gardening ability. I can't imagine non mathematical constructs as they will be after completion. For example, when the girlfriend goes shopping, she can look at some paint and declare that it will go perfectly in my front room, whereas I can't.
The only sports I've ever been good at in my life, is footy (because I constantly played) and cue sports (because it's maths).
Basically, intelligence doesn't mean who can add up the quickest, there are so many different layers to it, which again makes the whole 'more intelligence = less violence' argument fall down.