Re: "If there were strong evidence of some form of life after death then this would certainly argue strongly against the sufficiency of neuroscientific materialism." I would say it certainly would argue against materialism, but not necessarily against the materialist view of the brain. It would just require a God to re-image the previously extant brain model, much like installing software on a new computer.

This is silly. Psychiatrists came up with a genetic model geneticists don't like because they treat patients who give family histories and can tell that it is completely impossible that schizoprenia is due to a single gene due to the inheritance pattern. What nobody in medicine wants to look at is the true cause, which in most cases is iatrogenic exposure to mercury. Genetics only create the environmental susceptibility.

Sounds silly to think it would make *that* big of a difference, since what I was clearly getting at was how econ (a social science) jumps out from the harder sciences. But OK, let's treat the # of google hits for "nobel laureate" and the field as being directly proportional to the # of winners in the field, the # of webpages about that field overall, and the propensity toward arguing from authority. 
 
(And that's certainly what the title "Nobel laureate" is doing -- it's not some neutral mention of there being a Nobel Prize. It's dignifying a particular person with the honorific "Nobel laureate.") 
 
So taking the # of hits with "nobel laureate" and the field / (# of winners in field * # of hits for the field overall), we get the following authority-arguing propensities (would make a great German word): 
 
Medicine: 8.9 E-6 
Chemistry: 1.6 E-5 
Physics: 2.0 E-5 
Economics: 5.6 E-5 
 
Point remains: the insecure social sciences are much more inclined to argue from authority than the harder sciences.

I think if all women looked just like Laetitia Casta, the world would be a better place. Except for my wife, because she's beautiful just the way she is,... so now I'm off that hook.

To comment on Steve's point about how the "blonder" nations of Europe scored higher on academic tests than "darker" European nations. Could these higher scores be due to the fact that many of these tests, which were composed by white, western Europeans, pose a cultural bias. This may be comparable to asking both Canadian and American students to write identical tests on Canadian history. Gee...I wonder if the Canadian students would score better?...Just a suggestion.