razib | November 29, 2006Foreign Policy has a interesting selection of charts. They show that "radicals" and "moderates" in the Muslim world are not that different. Below the fold is a chart which offers two facts
1) Radical Muslims are, on average, more educated than non-radical Muslims
2) Radical Muslims are, on average, more affluent than non-radical Muslims
Should this surprise? I don't think so. Look to the history of the United Kingdom, Protestant radicalism took root in the highly literate environs of East Anglia. Health and wealth are often conducive to religious utopianism and reformation.
razib | November 29, 2006Over at Michael Brendan Dougherty's place a debate broke out over the relative importance of language vs. religion in the Irish identity. This could perhaps be abstracted and extrapolated to many peoples and nations. In the comments Daniel Larison offered:
But then I also think that Catholicism in Ireland predates the 19th century and has more to do with Irish culture than a nearly dead Celtic language that was mostly revived by modern nationalists.
Larison is no idiot, a Ph.D. candidate in Byzantine Studies he certainly has the sense and knowledge to take the long view, but this seemed a…
razib | November 28, 2006
I grew up in the Northeast (almost New England) and the Pacific Northwest. Here is a map of American English dialects.
Via Shaitan. You can take the quiz here.
razib | November 28, 2006Science Daily summarizes findings that Neandertal teeth grew at the same rate as modern humans. John Hawks applies the skeptical eye of a scientist. N matters....
razib | November 27, 2006Orac has a rather thorough post on eugenics, and what Richard Dawkins has recently had to say on it. Here is the dictionary.com definition of eugenics:
...the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).
First, in a historical context Dawkins' addressing the question of…
razib | November 26, 2006Update: Chris has a follow up post.
Chris leaves nothing unsaid. A sample:
In that talk Dawkins sounds, at times, like a 5-year old with the vocabulary and factual knowledge of a world-renowned scientist....
I find it hypocritcal and, as an atheist, more than a little embarrassing that these fundamentalist, Dawkinsian, scientistic, self-styled free thinking atheists, who know jack about the history of religion, or serious philosophy and theology, feel that they can criticize religious fundamentalists for saying things about science (in the evolution-creationism debate, for example) when…
razib | November 26, 2006Interesting article which surveys the confusion in Europe right now as countries whose electoral systems are based on proportional representation are seeing a tendency by the populace to vote for parties of the far Right and far Left. This has resulted in unwieldly and unstable coalitions drawn from the ever shrinking center. Many Americans (and some Brits) have long complained of "winner take all" districts which results in ideologically impure parties who offer milquetoast alternatives. The flip side though of course is that small popular vote majorities tend to yield very sizable…
razib | November 25, 2006Below I made a reference to the heritability of religiosity. In a chat with Christer Chris that the heritability for religiosity was 0.5, and he was surprised at the result. I decided to double-check, and here is the latest paper:
Estimates of the degree of genetic and environmental influences on religiousness have varied widely. This variation may, in part, be due to age differences in the samples under study. To investigate the heritability of religiousness and possible age changes in this estimate, both current and retrospective religiousness were assessed by self-report in a sample of…
razib | November 24, 2006Samuel 17:36 - Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear: and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath defied the armies of the living God.
razib | November 24, 2006How has your post-T-day been if you are a citizen of the Greatest Nation in the World?TM Wow, I woke up this morning to a flare up in the Ed vs. PZ battle here on SB and elsewhere. Bora has the most most thorough round up of links, which can be reduced to theistic-evolutionists-are-sell-outs vs. theistic-evolutionists-are-OK-by-me. In many ways I do probably agree with Bora's perspective on this issue, there are a multiplicity of strategies, and different groups need to approach them from different angles. Of course, being a pragmatic libertarian conservative, I don't feel that Creationism…
razib | November 24, 2006Does Islam Forbid Befriending Non-Muslims?.
It is obvious that Jews patronize the Jews and Christians patronize the Christians, so why not Muslims patronize Muslims and support their own people. This verse is not telling us to be against Jews or Christians, but it is telling us that we should take care of our own people and we must support each other.
Num 31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
razib | November 24, 2006Via Kambiz I found this post which argues that the high-protein diet of the Mongols was important in allowing them to defeat their enemies, who were relatively nutritionally deficient. Perhaps. But history isn't that simple, after all, if "more meat = more ass-kicking," you wouldn't have predicated that the grain-fed Roman soldiers would be able to cut a scythe through meat & milk gorging Celts and Germans, would you? How did those ancient Italians defeat the northerners? If you read about the suppression of the rebellion of Boudicca and how outnumbered Roman infantry formed a…
razib | November 23, 2006Shelley Batts has a post, Whites-Only Scholarship as "Reverse Affirmative Action". Shelley sayeth:
...In order to ensure that universities, and students, benefit from a diverse education, often pro-active techniques are utilized to recruit minorities.
When the race war comes all of us colored folk will be marked by our skin or our countenance as The Enemy. But, today the reality is that various People of Color have rather different interests in some areas, and that within each group there are schisms of interest due to class (e.g., what does the Indian doctor have to do with the Indian…
razib | November 23, 2006A new paper in Nature, Global variation in copy number in the human genome, suggests that it isn't just SNPs that matter in regards to human variation. Those of you who are "in the know" aren't surprised, so this press release is a bit much. Along with a focus on gene regulation, this is a fascinating new area which expands our understanding of how we are how we are beyond the raw sequence. p-etr at my other blog has a lot more. RPM has a post scheduled on this topic, I saw a preview when he published it to make sure it looked right. The press is making a big deal out of this, so we'll…
razib | November 23, 2006The Messiah will be on In Our Time to discuss the evolutionary origins of altruism. They are pretty good about getting the archive up in a day or so. Interesting that they illustrate the idea with Mr. a priori Kant, or am I being pretentious and misunderstanding Kant? I simply suspect that Dawkins will argue and elucidate an evolutionarily beneficial situationalism.
Matthew 10:34 "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
razib | November 23, 2006Gene-culture coevolution is a topic of interest for me. Consider adult milk digestion. It's weird, and seems like a new adaptation. The lactase gene has been under such strong selection that it is often used (or the region around it) as a control to test whether new methods for detecting selection actually work where we think they should work.
Here are a few maps I reworked from this paper:
The area where cattle genes which produce milk are diverse is relevant because that is the region where milk producing cattle have likely been resident the longest. The logic is similar to why Africans…
razib | November 22, 2006Nick Anthis, he of the fake British accent, has a follow up post on "ethical stem cells."
razib | November 22, 2006David points out that they are talking about Mormons in The Corner today relating to Mitt Romney.
Jonah thinks that the Mormon thing might help
An evangelical who is married to a Mormon thinks that it isn't a big issue
Anti-Mormon readers weigh in
A Mormon comments on the anti-Mormons
Mormonism is a falsifiable cult
Another Mormon emailer
I posted something very long on Mormons last year. I am skeptical that Romney can make it past the Republican primaries, because ceteris paribus he just can't match up. I can't believe that the Republicans can't produce a convential Christian with Romney's…
razib | November 22, 2006A friend pointed to this massive collation of statistics on atheism across the world. I myself keep track of this literature and most of the values are pretty plausible, or I've seen them before (you can find The World Values Survey publications in any college library). This section caught my attention:
Justin Barret (2004) has argued that belief in God is a result of the "way our minds are structured" (p.viii) and "the way human minds operate" (p.30). He argues that belief in God is "greatly supported by intuitive mental tools"(p.17) and is "an inevitable consequence of the sorts of minds…