Why whales get no bigger
Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldboge…
Prediction markets
It’s News On Academia, Not Climate:Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not. If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opin…
1 million SNPs to bind us all
A a new paper in PLoS ONE, Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs:Our analyses both confirm and extend previous studies; in particular, we highlight the impact of various disp…
Lying with the GSS, easy, but not necessary
About year ago I thought perhaps more bloggers would start taking up the GSS. That really hasn’t happened. Sometimes I wonder why, and the other day I had one idea: it isn’t necessary for what most bloggers want to do, confirm what they already believe…
Mythical heroes
There’s a new evangelical Christian college in New York, the King’s College. You can read a somewhat quizzical article in The New York Times about it. This part caught my attention:
Clues about the college’s philosophical underpinnings reveal themselves here and there. One bulletin board recently listed the activities of the various houses, the King’s College […]
The mosaic of North American populations
A few months ago an interesting paper connected the historical demographics of New Hampshire with genetic variation. One of the notable features of North American history and culture is that it is a mosaic of different populations, and, that mosaic has…
A tale of two nations
One of the mantras of the new age is that European nations have to deal with diversity, something that’s new to them. This actually ahistorical. Some military units in the Austro-Hungarian Empire actually used English as the lingua franca because of th…
Data and social networks
Does anyone know of a free source of county level presidential results going back to the 19th century? I want to compare correlations in voting across time. I did find some data from Pennsylvania, and noted that the Great Flip seems not to be evident i…
Models of IQ & wealth
Steve Hsu has been interesting of late (interesting like Steve, not Malcolm). So, IQ, compression and simple models and If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?. For a theoretical physicist I find Steve to be eminently clear in his exposition of abstra…
Variation in belief 1988-2008, the rise of skepticism
Below in the comments David Heddle says:
Of course there is no way, that I can see, of estimating how many of those leaving the church were self-identified Christians but who were actually in-the-closet unbelievers. Perhaps (who knows?) this is a sizable group, one that is beginning to come out of the closet as the stigma […]
Latin America is not panmixia
A new provisional paper, Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations. Here are the results:Using 104 ancestry informative markers, we examined spouse correlations in genetic ancestry for Mexican spouse pairs recruited from Mexico City and…
Being wrong is good
I’m re-reading Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity now that I know a lot more American history than I did when I first read it in 2004. The book was probably written in the early 2000s, so it’s interesting to see what Samuel Huntington get’s wrong. In the early chapters he wishes […]
Fake fact: America is not secularizing
The whole post is at Gene Expression, but the chart to the left is the core of it. 1980-2008 can to a great extent be labelled a conservative era, when the New Right set the terms of the national debate on politics and culture. And yet concomitantly there was a massive secularization process, as 1 […]
Fake fact, America is not secularizing
How Will Religion Evolve?, asks John Tierney. He notes:If there is a religious instinct, how do we make sense of the declining church attendance in western Europe? As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the European trend as a harbinger of a general…
Hagarism, revision, and everything we think is wrong (?)
This is more a question for readers who know this stuff, what do you think about Patricia Crone & company in their revision of the early history of Islam? I’m more of a Hugh Kennedy guy because I don’t know much about this field and would prefer to…
Reviews of The Faith Instinct
Awhile back Mr. Bradlaugh mentioned he was going to review The Faith Instinct. His alter-ego has now put up a review. And so have I. Unbelievers have much to say about God on High.
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My review of The Faith Instinct
Over at ScienceBlogs now. It’s a dense book and I only focused on a few major elements. Like the God of the philosophers sometimes it seems like attempts to analyze religion always have to face up to the fact that the phenomenon is awesomely complex, a…
The Netherlands & SDA
In case you didn’t know, the SDA Archive has more than the GSS. For example, something called the Dutch Prejudice Survey 1998. Poking around, I confirmed a general trend you see in the GSS, more educated people tend to be ideologically polarized:Though…
Against infotainment
Steve has an interesting column up this week:Who will win the Super Bowl? Well, two minutes on Google leads me to a betting site that says the New Orleans Saints are +360, while the Indianapolis Colts are +385. (I don’t even know what those numbers are…
Creationism in the Muslim world
A ScienceBlogs I have a post on Muslim Creationism data up. The paper, On being religious : patterns of religious commitment in muslim societies, has lots of information. You can download it at the link. Here are the topline results for evolution:
It isn’t a representative sample:
About 45% of American Muslims exhibit some level of belief […]