I am a teenager who doesn't understand teenagers?

I am 16 and feel like I am too high level of a thinker for my age. I am big into philosophical, political, and religious debate, and have very sophisticated opinions on all of them. I have hung out with the same crowd of friends all of high school, and just a couple months ago I realized that I didn't understand them or act like them at all. They are a crowd that gets straight A's, along with myself, and even the member of my group who I consider to be my best friend I don't understand. What confuses me is that we are the brightest of the grade, but they seem not just foolish (because foolishness doesn't mean stupidity), but they seem unsofisticated as far as anything beyond the school curriculum is concerned. I always know more than them about EVERYTHING else (the ways of the world, how things work, why things happen, etc.) and I don't spend my time studying them or anything. The problem is not all that, but is that I have a completely different thought process, and I just plain don't think like a teenager, and I end up being the awkward one in a group. I feel like I am a totally different type of person and there is nobody in my school that is like me. I don't get the teacher's pet award or get the absolute highest grades, but I see myself as far as real world intelligence goes, far superior. In conversation, I will get into a REAL discussion, and everyone else finds those to be boring and there is too much thinking involved. I find those conversations to be the best ones, where you learn from each other through conversation about things in our world. More recently, I have decided to try and retain myself and not go into that kind of conversation, and I find myself being the awkward quiet person. What I want to try and figure out is, first: why are my teenage peers so interested in mindless conversation? and second: why am I not interested in mindless conversation, and how can I learn to make normal conversation for my age?