When talking about evolution to the public it is very important (in the American context) to emphasize that religion & Darwin are not plainly at odds, that there are many religious folk who accept the basic fact of evolutionary theory. Nevertheless, via Chris Mooney, I see that Greg Graffen of Bad Religion has published a thesis titled Evolution, Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist World-View. Graffen surveyed prominent evolutionary biologists on their attitude to and adherence toward religion and other metaphysical extra-scientific issues. One key point to note is that they are members of the National Academy of Sciences.
About 5.5% of respondents assented to a belief in a personal God and 6.5% believed in a Deist God (Survey results, PDF). This tracks well with the Larson & Witham survey of 1998 of NAS members, 14% of mathematicians, 7.5% of physicists and 5.5% of biologists responded that they believed in a personal God. So, it seems clear that evolutionary scientists are not special in their irreligion, rather, it itends to be a property of NAS members in general. Opinions about immortality (life after death) seem to also be about the same for the two surveys.
72% of the surveyed evolutionary biologists believed that religion might be an adaptation, while only a minority agreed with the idea of separate “magestaria” (a Gouldian term), with an even smaller faction assenting to a seamless harmony. Religion is a rather complex social phenomena strongly influenced by environmental factors, but that evolutionary biologists should be open to an adaptationist and functional explanation of religious behavior strongly suggests to me a Gouldian separation between the social and biological is a minoritarian position.
Addendum: My current opinion is that in the most general sense a naive functional interpretation is difficult for religion, though I suspect that the varieties in which it manifests itself are constrained by functional-biological delimiters. But “religion” is a very broad definition, and so a one-size-fits-all explanation is probably untenable.
Posted by razib at 04:11 PM | | TrackBack Insourcing
CNBC has a story up about a woman, Kathy Brittain White, the former CIO of Cardinal Health, starting a company called Rural Sourcing. The aim of the company? To move low paying IT jobs to the dirt-poor parts of rural America instead of to foreign countries such as India.
Now, I am not an economist, so my thoughts are those of a layman, but I see two problems;
1) Rural America is sparsely populated compared to densely populated India, so it is more of a workers market. In India it is much easier to keep salaries low since if a talented individual wants a raise you can easily fire him and find another qualified person within a day, not so in Arkansas where quality workers would be hard to find.
2) Related to the first. The closer proximity of Rural America to big population centers where the cost of living is much higher would result in an increased rate of increase in the cost of living in the said rural areas.
So, in my opinion, it is a good short-term solution but the outsourcing to India is still better in the long term. But that is my layman’s opinion and would enjoy hearing from our economist readers.
Thanks to JS Henderson at Mises Economics Blog for the tip.
Update Heh, I just had a thought. IT jobs require a certain level of intelligence and education that may be lacking in rural places such as Arkansas (no, I am not calling all Southerners stupid), so you may have an exodus from big urban centers to the rural areas. Think of it, an unemployed, college-educated, person in a big city might trade a high urban salary and the city lifestyle for a job in a place where said salary would provide a decent living. This would probably result in the ‘natives’ still being unemployed and the ‘cultural’ destruction of the rural areas by the ‘city-slickers’.
Posted by scottm at 01:01 PM | | TrackBack Tolkien Diagnosis
Hat Tip to Geek Press, I thought this was quite clever Psychiatric Diagnosis of Gollum