Those who lament the loss of species, it seems to me, aren't primarily concerned about economic value. Rather, they regard each species as having its own unique spiritual value-- just as every child is "special" on Sesame Street-- and they see a value in diversity itself. In traditional religious terms, this is analogous to the Biblical Flood. God made sure that "every" animal species was preserved, and then he promised never to extinguish life on Earth-- a promise that by implication covered all of the species on the Ark. Bible readers in the ancient world (and some of them today) assumed that all species had been made at the creation and no new ones would ever emerge. Environmentalists with a scientific bent (a minority of the flock) understand that species are born and die in the natural course of evolution, just as individuals do, and they may even relate to that process in a spiritual way. But they are really worried that a high RATE of evolution will "impoverish" our planet. Although I personally find environmentalism to be a thin gruel of a religion, this particular theme resonates with me, and probably with most people. Of course, there are probably unknown trillions of species on other planets, so not to worry so much.

Almost all the EFFECTIVE anti-science agitation in recent decades has come from the environmental Left: i.e. fanatic opposition to all GM foods (and even to GM bacteria for fuel production), opposition to using animals in research, opposition to cloning of animals, opposition to DDT and other safe, vital pesticides, hysteria about vaccines, and opposition to embryonic stem cell research (the U.S. under Bush and now Obama maintained some modest limitations on federal funding, while the Greens in Germany pushed through a total ban on research that included criminal penalties for German scientists working on ESC anywhere in the world). In the US, AIDS "activists" for decades used agitation and political intimidation to prevent mass HIV testing and contact tracing. Tens of thousands died as a result-- and few scientists had the courage to stand up to them. The measures successful implemented as a result of noisy leftist obscurantist campaigns have already resulted in millions of deaths from malaria and starvation in Africa. On the other hand American Christian doubts about evolution and other scientific issues have had no negative impact on human life or welfare anywhere. As for climate change, politicians on all sides are guilty of ignorance and group-think, but the original sin is Al Gore's. His misleading and scientifically embarrassing documentary took a technical matter and turned it into a political war, where it has remained. And yet people who imagine they are standing for science ignore the ferocious anti-science efforts of the left, and instead obsess about irrelevancies. It's impolite to challenge people's motives, and I'm sure you think you are merely standing for science, but to me it looks like you are merely engaging in tribal identity politics. Until you face the real threats, you are letting science down.

Razib- I exaggerated for effect. My main point: the purpose of advancing scientific research and implementing its practical findings is not served by publicly ridiculing Christians and conservatives, who are NOT reflexive opponents of progress the way some European Greens have become. In any case, both groups have a right to advance their views, however religious or non-rational, and their values must somehow be accommodated in a democratic polity, as George Bush tried to do when he opened up NIH funding for SOME embryonic stem cell research (it had been prohibited by Congress and Clinton had ignored the issue). Even Green fanatics may serve a cautionary purpose, by forcing scientists and science-based corporations to test above and beyond what may have seemed sufficient. Most politicians on all sides happen to be ignorant of science, as are most non-scientists, and they all say stupid things. For that matter, scientists often sound naive, ignorant, or limited when they discuss politics. It would be easy to pluck out laughable quotes from any of them. Doing so with O'Donnell serves a partisan political purpose, not a scientific one. kjmtchl has a right to her partisan self-identification, but she shouldn't confuse that with the cause of science. O'Donnell is running as a fiscal hawk and conservative skeptic of government, while her opponent is a standard left liberal. Intelligent voters will choose based on how they want their new senator to vote. The rest is twaddle, and doesn't really belong in a science blog.

It would be useful to correct the data for parents' income and social status for the same universe of graduates. Privileged parents steer their children to the high-ranking schools. Perhaps the same children would be as likely to become highly-paid 25-year-olds if they spent their undergraduate years at lower-ranking colleges. Privileged parents steer their children to the high-ranking schools. And Razib-- what do you mean by "RE-impose" quotas for Jews in undergraduate admissions?

Don't some mutations from the wild type bring advantages, such as superior intelligence?

I believe Israel's relative wealth has shot up since massive reform and privatization 10-15 years ago. Give them time. As for inter-country comparisons of elite groups, the smaller the elite community as a proportion of the general population, the richer they are. Cf. Indians in colonial East Africa compared with their relatives back home. Chinese in the US compared with Chinese in China. Jews in countries with small Jewish communities (Venezuela, Colombia) compared with those in the U.S. Within the US, the mass Jewish community in New York has much larger lower-middle and working-class populations than the smaller Jewish communities around the country. In other words: how many doctors, lawyers, and real estate developers can a state or country possibly support?

"Which societies..?" You mention only one country, Iran, and you also have "parts of America" in mind. Then you mention an activity, selective abortion of females, that does NOT take place in Iran or anywhere in America, but rather among Buddhist, Daoist, or non-religious Chinese, and among Hindu Indians. Don't get me wrong: I abhor the values and behavior of the Iranian Islamist tyrants, and I disagree with many religious Americans on gay issues, but that doesn't justify accusing people of crimes they do not commit. The communities in America that take religion most seriously, whether Baptist, Orthodox Jewish, Amish, etc., or the like, have low levels of abortion in general, as does Iran, and do NOT have a disproportionately high male population, which is a conclusive sign of female abortion. Selective abortion of females is an issue that many American pro-choice activists have tried to avoid. Since they are not on record as fighting this horrifying trend (tens of millions of females aborted in recent decades), they will not be in a strong position to oppose selective abortion of homosexuals. We'll have to count on the Christian right to oppose such a practice if it ever takes root. In any case, abortion is a less likely outcome that medical intervention in utero to reduce the likelihood of homosexuality. See this article in the New Scientist about an intervention that is already taking place to address a genuine medical condition that also affects sexual orientation: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19151-debate-over-gender-disorder-drug.html. Here's a prediction: at some point in the medium future American society will be ready to accept homosexual orientation as morally equivalent to heterosexuality; at just about that point, medical intervention will be available. If even a minority of parents take that route, homosexual orientation will begin to decline, as fewer and fewer such individuals emerge from the womb.

In China, there is no evidence of any substantial literary tradition before the Zhou; the proto-Chinese writing system was at most a few hundred years old when the Zhou defeated the Shang. Nor were there any large states until the Shang achieved one around 1200 BCE, and even that was probably less extensive and less organized than those of the Middle East (and perhaps the Indus Valley), and it didn't last very long. In other words, Chinese civilization was just emerging from a welter of non-literate Neolithic cultures at the start of the period you refer to, while Mesopotamia and Egypt could have celebrated 2,000 years of fairly well-documented history and hoary traditions of poetry, saga, and philosophy/theology, as old and venerable to them as Christianity is to Westerners today. Temporal parallels between China and the other foundational Old World civilizations are probably useful only beginning with the Axial Age. From then on we've moved in parallel, with relatively trivial time lags here and there (the Machine Age triumphant in England by 1800, the US and Germany 1870, Russia and Japan 1900, and China and India shortly after (interrupted in China by wars, largely imposed by outsiders).

An alternative hypothesis: people tend to see themselves as more religious as they get older, and have been doing so for generations. Young adults in prosperous countries feel less connected to any of their birth communities, but often return with time.  
 
I remember reading about the Soviet Union back in the 60s, seeing pictures of churches, attended mostly by old people. They're still attended largely by old people--but today's old people are the non-religious young people of the past.  
 
This is true about myself (and some other friends). Raised in a moderately pious household, liberated in my youth, disillusioned with the truths of the secular world and the workplace, I'm back in the embrace of tradition now.  
 
Do you have parallel age-related surveys from earlier generations?

Jaakkeli, 
 
Not just Germany. Nuclear energy has also been under attack for a long time in the UK. There, and in the US, the environmentalists are entirely responsible for this nonsense. The hated Bush has actually been on the right side on this, but he hasn't gotten very far in Congress. But only in Germany, with its large Green Party, is government policy actually aimed at the complete elimination of nuclear power. 
 
France is indeed the great exception-- 80% nuclear electricity, the highest in the world, and they never faltered, God bless them. It's a puzzle indeed-- how did they avoid the anti-nuclear propaganda? Is their environmental movement weaker? Or is it just a greater deference to bureaucrats? 
 
By the way, almost nobody in the US really votes based on creationism, and no national candidate has ever even talked about it. It's mostly an issue in local school board elections-- which the creationists have usually lost, even in conservative and rural states, since the media and the educational establishment is against them. 
 
As far as "imposing their own religious views--" please try to see my point. When the Greens killed stem cell research in Germany, they were also imposing their religious views.  
 
Just because they are not officially called a "religion" doesn't make their views any less non-rational or less moralistic. Their opposition to animal research, to cloning, to genetic engineering, is ALL based on what have to be called religious values, a kind of pantheism or nature religion. I could easily see Christians also opposing genetic engineering or animal research, but in fact they have ignored it.  
 
The Greens have a right to try to impose their values, just like everyone else but I have a right to point out what is going on and to resist them.  
 
The US religious militants focus most of their energy on symbolic issues, like evolution in the elementary school classroom; even when they "win" they have almost no practical impact. I wish that were true of the Greens, whether in Europe or the US. Maybe because they don't call themselves a religion they can get away with it.

Razib, 
 
The 200-year-old Church tax notwithstanding, Christianity has just about zero input in lawmaking in Germany, or in most other European countries, including even Italy and Spain these days. The elite culture, in the media and in the business and scientific establishments, is utterly post-Christian.  
 
By contrast, the Greens, through effective propaganda, have had a powerful practical impact on research (anything to do with animals, for example) and, even more on the implementation of research in a host of fields (cloning, genetic engineering, nuclear energy).  
 
Their power in Europe far exceeds that of creationists in the US. The one success of evangelical Christians in the US was the federal stem cell ban, which has so far had no practical impact-- in fact, it has stimulated billions in replacement funding at the state and private levels. In any case, all three presidential candidates oppose it, so even this trivial triumph is evaporating.  
 
I wish I could be so sanguine about the Greens' impact. Just in the field of nuclear energy, they have had a huge negative impact on CO2 emissions, let alone taken a huge toll in coal miner deaths over the decades. This insanity continues year by year, as old plants are decommissioned and no new ones are built.  
 
Friends of science should direct their attention accordingly.

I'm not sure that creationism is a "problem" in the US, since it doesn't at all interfere with practical science education in high schools, let alone at universities, or with the pursuit of science at universities, the government, or industry. 
 
In fact, the sole impact of "religious" views on the practice of science in the US is the limited ban on federal government financing of embryonic stem cell research. In Germany, a militantly secular country, there is an actual BAN on such research. Until this week, I believe, German scientists faced criminal penalties for engaging in such research anywhere in the world. It is still limited within Germany. By contrast, the research itself is not at all banned in the US; in fact, state laws have guaranteed funding at a much higher level than can possibly be used in the forseeable future. 
 
These foolish anti-science measures were imposed by Christians in the US and by the Greens in Germany, in the latter case as the price of their continuation in the government coalition. Greens across Europe have also taken militant anti-scientific stands against nuclear energy and against any kind of assaults against Mother Nature such as genetic modification of plants, animal testing, cloning of all kinds, and even genetic medicine. Their record on DDT use is also not encouraging, and some of them are anti-vaccination as well. They have been far more successful in imposing their agenda than have evangelical Christians in the US. 
 
Europe has lost interest in Christianity, but has not become secular. Much of the elite is in the grip of a new pantheistic Earth religion, which, as I've pointed out above, is far more influential in Europe than evangelical Christianity is in the US.  
 
Even the limited US funding ban on new human embryonic cell lines is not likely to continue, as it is opposed by all three of the presidential candidates. But nuclear plants continue to be shut down in Europe as we speak. 
 
If you resist the use of the word "religion" to describe the Greens, the practical implication is nil. Where still talking about a moralistic movement that has succeeded in limiting science and technology to a shocking and harmful degree.

"depending on your aim/study population, doing ancestral informative genotyping might not be a good return-on-investment. funds are finite." 
 
But in the US, more than half of new HIV infections are among African Americans (as defined by themselves and their medical practitioners). In the world at large, the huge majority of those infected with HIV are Africans. 
 
Therefore, even if African ancestry has only a small genetic impact on treatment, the multiplying effect is huge. In fact, it would be better to recruit ONLY people of African ancestry than just to sign up cases in the US without regard to race, which might produce 13 or fewer percent African ancestry people. But best of all, recruit a representative genetic variety of candidates, as this study did. 
 
By the way, the facts that a majority of new HIV infections in America are among African ancestral people, and that Africa has such a huge burden, suggests that there may indeed be a difference in susceptibility and progression to disease. I happen to be a gay man living in NYC, and I'm here to tell you that loads of white and Asian men are fucking around all the time unsafely, yet they're not being infected to nearly the same degree.  
 
If anything, I think it's racist to ASSUME that there's no genetic difference; as if, "sure THEY'RE getting sick; they're not careful."  
 
"Racist"- one who wishes ill or persecutes another based on ancestry. "Near racist"- one who refuses to abandon an ideological or religious notion even at the cost of great fatality among another ancestral group, especially a disadvantaged or persecuted group. "Anti-racist"- one who acts to help an individual or group that is persecuted or disadvantaged, e.g. by doing relevant science, by giving poor people medicine. 
 
A scientist who deals with these issues without any emotions or practical aims one way or the other doesn't necessarily belong to any of these camps. S/he should be left alone to do the work that will help anti-racists do THEIR work. If they are clear-headed and decent, their findings will NEVER be racist. Racists have never needed scientific findings to back them up; they're about something else altogether. 
 
How to educated near racists? Rationally, explain how their attachment to anti-scientific notions actually undermines their more important humanitarian goals.

John wrote: 
"the Waco assault was planned under Bush and executed 5 weeks after Clinton was inaugurated." 
 
Lots of actions are planned and never implemented. Janet Reno was on the scene, and gave the go-ahead order. That must count for something.