My math is a little rusty, but I wanted to offer a little statistical observation relating to ID and being dumb.

Let…
ID = believe in ID
dumb = are dumb

Prior for being dumb: talented tenth (or if you have a certain someone in mind, fill in your own prior)
P(dumb) = 0.9
P(~dumb) = 0.1

Likelihood of believing in ID given you are dumb (or not dumb): I made these values up, but we could probably find survey data to refine those estimates. Try your own guess.
P(ID|dumb) = 0.8
P(ID|~dumb) = 0.4

Bayes rule…
P(dumb|ID) = 0.947
P(dumb|~ID) = 0.750 [correction]

Sometimes when I’m bored I stumble over to the The Valve, where gnxp regular John Emerson also hangs out. Today I saw this post which addressed the testimony of a sociologist of science for the pro-Design side in the Dover case. Basically, the issue is that the sociologist in question isn’t a standard issue Post-Modernist, so what’s going on here? John lands a good immediate punch, and I should have let it rest. But I had to add something myself:

his cv doesn’t indicate any natural science background. i think that someone who wants to engage in meta-scientific chatter should at least have some basis within science ahead of time so that one is familiar with the culture. kuhn had a background in physics.

The author of the post, Jon Goodwin, responded, and I then went at it again. But the denouement was this comment from Jon:

Razib, I disagree very strongly with Fuller’s position about this–to the point of mystification–but it’s parochial to suggest that more time taking multiple-choice tests and dissecting things would have affected his later thinking. It’s just completely irrelevant to the argument he’s making. [my emphasis -Razib]

On the part I emphasized. I suggested in the comments that it is important for a philosopher or sociologist of science to have some familiarity with science or the scientific method. And, just as patent attorneys often have undergraduate or graduate level training in a science (though this isn’t a hard and fast rule), so it would benefit intellectuals whose terrain is science to have some up close and personal contact. Now, first off, for a bachelors, I am skeptical that the expectation is that one could complete coursework with a predominance of multiple-choice tests. This certainly isn’t so in physics and chemistry, where problem solving is priority, and not even in much of biology. Second off, the dirty details of dissection, or prepping experiments, etc. are I think essential dimensions of the scientific experience. If you are a sociologist of science, that is part of experience of that society.

As for the “big picture” of Fuller’s argument that scientists themselves are not always the best at making meta-judgements because of their technical specializations, well, that’s true much of the time. But it doesn’t follow that someone who has distance will be better able to see the grand scope if they have no special handle on any of the details. Rather, the best scholars, I would argue, are those who can bring both the insider and outsider perspective. Thomas Kuhn had a doctorate in physics. Many of the thinkers in the Vienna Circle came from mathematical and scientific backgrounds. I have argued here that science is operationally a social enterprise, so it follows that one would gain great insight if one had been an active participant in the collective of a lab meeting, or socialized over some beers after a long day. Good sociology and history, and yes, even philosophy, should have some anthropology at its base.

This does not mean that what I allude to above are necessary conditions, or even sufficient ones, for a great scholar of the broad expanse of scientific learning. I’m not one, after all, to say that you have to be a Christian to study Christianity, or an African to study Africans. On the other hand, completing a 4 year science degree is much easier than forcing yourself to convert to Christianity, and not impossible like becoming an African if you aren’t.

Consider if you will that an alien anthropologist tells some Navajos that the Clatsops are also Navajos. When the Navajos reject that contention, the anthropologist responds, “Well, being Navajos, you can’t see the grand scope of how Navajoism expresses itself. Trust me, the Clatsops are Navajos.” Now, if I tell the alien anthropologist, “hey, how about you go live among the Navajos before you lecture them about what constitutes appropriate Navajoism,” and another individual responds, “Oh please. Now, I disagree with the alien anthropologist, obviously Clatsops and Navajos are distinct tribes. But you don’t need to go live in a dirty hut on some rez in the middle of Arizona to figure that out.” To which I’d say, “Well, yeah, you’d think so, but obviously not.”

Update: One thing, I don’t want to leave the impression that I am opposed to meta-analysis of science, and wish to leave each discipline as sui generis endeavours. There are obviously broad trends and characteristics that unite the natural sciences which should be studied by scholars. Some of the anthroplogists I most admire take a broad naturalistic view of their subject matter (human culture), but they nevertheless have some done field work among a specific people. In their literature it is clear that they use their specific knowledge of ethnic group X to test their deductive models about how cultural units in general should function and behave.

Addendum: I will admit that Jon’s allusion to “multiple-choice” is what prompted this post, my experience with other people who have completed science degrees is that we envy the multiple choice tests that seem rife in other departments. As it is, quite a few courses demand on-the-fly problem solving skills where questions are specifically generated which have no familiar models in the homework sets.

Update II: I’ve been busy today, but it has come to my attention that something similar to what I allude to above has been occurring on the political Right over in The Corner. I haven’t read it in detail, but Derb is joing the fray and mixing it up. Here are the links:

Science vs. scientism – John J. Miller
Science vs. scientism – Jonah, quoting a reader:

It is therefore not the task of science to recognize and define the boundaries of science. This is a job for metaphysics (the study of non-physical realities) and epistemology (the study of how we know what we know). Both of these are elements in the philosophy of science.

More from Jonah (Jonah has some good common sense in this comment, in my opinion).
On science vs. scientism – Derb
Re: on science vs. scienti
sm – Jonah (defends humanists)
Himmelfarb – Ramesh (defending her piece in TNR, beyond subscription wall, but you aren’t missing anything)
More science vs. scientism – Derb
What Derb owes – Jonah (annoyed with Derb)
Yet more science vs. scientism – Derb (taking a hard evolcon stand)
Himmelfarb, CTD – Ramesh
Does Himmelfarb deserve better – Derb disses Gertrude again!
Science and philosophy – Ian Murrray, English conservative, tacitly supports Derb (from what I can tell)
Re: does Himmelfarb deserve better – Charles Murray shits on Derb here. In Derb’s defense, the piece in TNR was a whole lot of fluff. I’ll read her other stuff later perhaps, so I can’t say….
Uh-Oh – Derb trying to make peace
Kristol, Theocons & Power – Jonah talks about some political stuff
The one thing you can say about Irving Kristol – J-Pod types something
Neocons vs. Darwin – Derb throws a rock at J-Pod
Feedback – K-Lo defends pro-ID conservatives (most of ’em in America)

I’m sure I missed stuff, and I didn’t read ’em all. But, kind of interesting, shows how some Tribes cross political boundaries. If I didn’t know any better I would have guessed GC got a hold of John’s account and started posting, some of the comments were so biophilic….

Update III: Steve Fuller, the historian-philosopher of science who triggered this post ultimately with his pro-ID testimony in Pennsylvania, has responded over at The Valve. You can go judge for yourself if his contentions are worth interposing himself into forces of great social and cultural magnitude on this side of the pond.

For the last few years I have been working on a new architecture for the Internet, which you can read about here:

Problem:

How can we deliver applications as services, over the Internet, and get PC-like functionality, where each user can mix-and-match applications as if they are on a PC?

(Note: The question does not refer to pure user-interface issues that are addressed by AJAX!)

Solution:

Domicel is a virtual personal Internet domain. It gives the end user the look-and-feel of working on a PC – without the PC! Applications are provided as on-line services, in an object-oriented paradigm. The aggregate of a user’s objects (think: icons) from all applications, hosted anywhere in the world, is their Domicel – there is no one place in which a Domicel’s objects reside, no bottlenecks, and no central point of failure.

Or, to put it another way, it does for applications what the World Wide Web does for documents.

It’s still very primitive – I think of it as being the Internet version of the Altair, “the spark that led to the personal computer revolution”. At this point, I would like to get a few good nerds interested. If I can get it going, I think it will be very big.

You can see the current state of the art here. Notice the links in the upper right-hand corner.

PS: There is the beginning of a discussion on Domicel here.

Newsweek has a piece up titled Women of Al Qaeda, coauthored by Lionel Tiger (The Decline of Males and Men in Groups). Just like the standard Left-Right spectrum compresses a considerable amount of the multi-dimensional character of genuine political opinion, so the liberal-moderate-fundamentalist spectrum in Islam masks the tensions and diversity within the various groups. I haven’t explored it in detail yet, but, suffice it to say that there are differences and variations within the ‘Salafist’ umbrella. In 1993 the ‘supreme religious leader’ of Saudi Arabia declared that the Earth was flat. Or did he? A Muslim website published a translation of a letter from Shaikh ‘Abdul-‘Aziz ibn ‘Abdullah ibn Baz. He affirm that the earth is a sphere, but, adds that he “…only declared kufr upon the one who says that the sun is stationary” (that is, all of you heliocentrists out there). Now, I bring this up to show that there are ‘traditionalists,’ and then there are traditionalists. The violent terrorist Salafists probably don’t spend too much time waging jihad in the name of the geocentric hypothesis, especially since many have science and engineering backgrounds. In Western Muslims and the Future of Islam Tariq Ramadan goes into detail about the varieties of Salafists out there, and ‘Salafi reformists’ are not literalists. I don’t know much more than that at this point (oh, but I will….). Even ignoring what I have written about theological incorrectness, we need not to be complacent about Salafi terrorists. Though they style themselves revivers of the old traditions, it seems clear that is all cant, they will shape their neo-7th century in their own images and according to their own wills.

Paul Bloom takes his hypothesis that humans are innately dualist and applies it to religion in the most recent issue of The Atlantic in Is God an Accident? Here is his conclusion:

Nobody is born with the idea that humanity started in the Garden of Eden, or that martyrs will be rewarded in heaven; these ideas are learned. But the universal themes of religion are not learned. They are part of human nature.

The theory of natural selection is an empirically supported account of our existence. But almost nobody believes it. We may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer.

If you’ve read my previous posts on the cognitive science of religion you won’t find anything surprising. The most important point about the new research that is emerging over the past 15 years is just how banal and conventional many of the cognitive processes are which result in normal theism. For example, consider the common motif of sacred relics, the Buddha’s tooth or fragments of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, this is easily explained by the tendency of the human mind to imagine contagions all around us. In this case, the sacred contagion is one we actually wish to encounter. In terms of God being an “accident,” it maybe that saying God is an accident is like saying that heat is a byproduct of work, if God-belief is the result of the interaction and overreaction of banal cognitive processes, then it could be inevitable in minds of sufficient complexity.

In regards to evolution, the basic thesis of macroevolution, that species X is the ancestor of species Y, is simple enough. But the tendency to imbue species with distrinct and disjoint essences is problematic in terms of making common descent believable. One reason I put so much emphasis on an internalization of the basics of microevolutionary population genetics is that the processes of and mutation, selection and drift, along with their interaction other factors such as migration or long term effective population size, are essential to enable one to have an intuition of why macroevolution is inevitable.

Now, it is true that some of the claims of the world religions are manifestly mysterious, uintuitive and intellectually taxing. But I’ve claimed elsewhere that theological constructs are simply notional badges which identify ingroup-outgroup boundaries, and their perpetuation is generally through mnemonics rather than internalization and comprehension. This phenemonon is not restricted to religion, how many Communists actually read Das Kapital?

Researchers have associated a variant of the IGF2R gene with lower IQ in males–by an average of 20 IQ points. From the Dallas Morning News article [registration required]:

The researchers studied about 300 children with an average age of 10. The children, all Caucasian, came from six counties in the Cleveland area. As a group, males – but not females – who had the variant gene had IQ scores about 20 points lower than males who didn’t. […]

Dr. Jirtle said his assertion that the IGF2R gene affects IQ is bolstered by experiments in mice. When he and his colleagues disabled a copy of the gene in lab mice – an experiment intended to mimic humans who inherit the variant copy of the gene – they noticed that the male mice were slow learners on a maze test. Electrical recordings of the mice’s brain tissue were also altered in a way that is consistent with slow learning.

Also, Dr. Jirtle said, what scientists already know about the protein produced from the IGF2R gene fits with a role in brain function. Research has suggested the protein regulates cell growth as well as the speed at which signals travel between nerve cells.

In 1998, scientists from England reported a connection between a portion of the IGF2R gene and IQ, but later retracted their work when they couldn’t replicate the results. Dr. Jirtle’s research concerns a different, but nearby, area of the same gene.

Yes. Though I’ve said it a million times, but I will say it again, over the past generation the tendency toward respecting cultural particularisms has come at the expense of expanding the rights of individuals. This is not an incoherent or particularly new position, the group as the operational unit of identity worked for the Ottomans and their millet system. I just wish people would be more honest about the reality that life is about choices.

This is cool. Southern Hemisphere Springtails: Could They Have Survived Glaciation of Antarctica?:

…In contrast, the deep divergences found for the four endemic Antarctic species indicate that they represent a continuous chain of descent dating from the break-up of Gondwana to the present. We suggest that the diversification of these springtail species (21-11 MYA) in ice-free glacial refugia throughout the Trans-Antarctic Mountains was caused by the glaciation of the Antarctic continent during the middle to late Miocene.

About two months ago I posted an entry where I sketched out an extremely simple model for skin color assuming there were 6 loci and two alleles (on and off). There was a reference in the comments to “5 loci” for skin color as a quantitative trait. From what I can gather that assumption derives from a paper published in 1981 by Russ Lande, which is online. In reality that paper simply draws upon older work from 1964, and its primary focus is on estimating the number of loci in crosses between heterogenous populations (using inbred lines was the way pioneered by Sewall Wright). But, it turns out that Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer discuss that older work in Genetics of Human Populations, which I have a copy of. Today genomics is exploring the details of the loci which control for skin color, but we have a long way to go, so I’m going to reproduce some of the data and conclusions from Bodmer & Cavalli-Sforza’s work so that it will be online….

Table 9.6
Means and Variances of Skin Color Measurements
Antilog of (Reflectance at 685 mμ) for Various Matings

Population – No. of Observations, Mean, Variance (X 1000)

Caucasian – 105, 0.421, 1.09
Negro – 106, 0.225, 1.05
F1 – 94, 0.334, 1.59
Negro backcross – 26, 0.304, 1.71
Caucasian backcross – 30, 0.382, 2.00
F2 – 14, 0.346, 1.99

FYI, an F2 is simply F1 X F1, explaining the small sample size. By analyzing the means they concluded there was no “dominance effect.” The hybrid individuals tended to have skin reflectance measurements about midway between their parental values. An analysis of the variance yielded the number of loci as 4, but, this was subject to a very high error. Nevertheless, 4 is probably the low bound, as these analyses usually underestimate the true number. But, they often capture the essential gist because for many traits a small number of genes determine most of the variation on a trait (the traditional assumption, reflected in Plomin’s work, is that IQ is different in that there isn’t much with more than 1% effect, though Greg and Henry’s Askhenazi work are starting to puncture that preconception). The genetic data coming out right now suggests that contrary to the implication in the model above (stated explicitly in the text) Europeans are not fixed for a particular allele on many of genes (i.e., MC1R). But, the phenotypic outcome of “loss of function” mutations is basically the same, so in terms of quantitative traits I think you can ignore the lack of identity by state on the nucleotide level.

Notes: They took the antilog to adjust for scaling effects, didn’t matter anyhow. Additionally, I left the text as is aside from reformatting some of it, so sorry about the use of words like “Negro” if you are offended, it was 1971.

In my previous post where I elaborated on “theological incorrectness” and the deceptiveness of the tendency for humans to ascribe their behaviors and actions to beliefs which are shown to be irrelevant upon further scrutiny, I might have given the impression that the ideas themselves do not matter. I didn’t explicitly say that, and I think it is important to distinguish between evoked and epidemiological aspects of culture. The former refers to aspects of culture which are generalized and universal reflections of the expression of behavorial phenotypes within a social matrix that are inevitable because of the architecture of our brains. For example, the universality of some sort of music, or symbolic artistry. Epidemiological culture refers to ideas which are replicated between minds and often exhibit intergroup variation, basically, memes. There are several major factors that will affect the fitness of memes, a) cognitive transmission biases, b) the replicative design of the meme (a meme that encourages universal skepticism might be too self-cannibalizing) and c) functional utility on the individual and cultural level (a meme which encourages suicide or celibacy will not spread).

It seems mean intercultural differences are significant, contra the standard narrative you get from evo psych types who seem to want to pretend that cultural differences are trivial epiphenomena. The reality is that of the major “high religions,” it is the Abrahamic ones which have been characterized by strong tendencies toward exclusion, persecution and fanaticism. This is not to deny that Indian or Chinese cultural traditions have also been characterized by religious acrimony, but, it seems less frequent and central to the identity of the culture.1 The tensions that emerge out of Abrahamic religions can be seen across vast swaths of western Eurasia, and the conflict between paganism and Christianity in Europe was recapitulated in a rather set form repeatedly over 1,000 years as the former gave way to the latter in a step-wise fashion. There is also a systematic difference between the character of the spread of the Abrahamic memeplexes and the the expansion of Buddhism as a pancultural religion, or, the Hinduization of groups in South Asia over time. If one reads about the acceptance of Buddhism in Tibet, Korea or Japan by ‘barbarian’ kings who wish to attain for themselves the imprimatur of civilized monarchs, one is struck by the far milder tensions between the new religion and the indigenous belief systems (Bon, Korean shamanism and Shinto, respectively, are all vital traditions which complement the Buddhist worldviews which suffuse the culture).

Nevertheless, even though the expectation for the modal behavior of those who espouse Abrahamic religions is likely different from those who adhere to non-Abrahamic religions, it is important to not forget that there is considerable variation around such expectations. The rather tolerant modern Congregationalism has little in common with its direct Puritan forebears. If fact, it might not be the expectation that is truly important, but the tendency toward variance of expression of the Abrahamic religions which results in their tendency toward fanaticism and utopianism of various sorts. Additionally, both expectation and variance must be interpreted in the context of other factors which result in confounding of models based solely on ideas (i.e., psychology, historical stochasticity and contingency). If one looks at the historical evidence it seems strongly plausible that religious faction and conflict was generally driven from above by temporal and clerical elites. Even in the case where the masses enthusiastically took up religiously motivated causes, as amongst the “Jew burners” of the medieval Rhineland, historical scholarship can usually glean strongly material motives amongst the primary players (in fact, the Church’s writ was relatively weak in the Rhineland and local notables who were in debt to prominent Jews seem to have mobilized the mobs, who might have been drawn in large part from their cronies). In other words, religious sanction was might have been a mask for more conventional violent conflicts between groups separated by outward markers. Finally, in recent years the rise of Hindutva, the history of State Shinto in Japan and the emergence of ‘Buddhist fundamentalism’ in Sri Lanka and Myanmar suggest that the modes that characterize Abrahamic religions can be exported to other religious systems.2

1 – Quite often in China religious conflict is closely coupled with social and political factors, and “persecution” is more easily understood as a byproduct political events. For example, the defrocking of tens of thousands of monks during the Tang dynasty and the repossession of monestaries was not because of doctrinal conflicts, rather, Buddhism had become an institutional rival to the monarchy, which in China always tended to result in an assertion of the monarchy at the expense of the alternative institution. In India, religious wars between Jain and Hindu kings in southern India was a somewhat exceptional and peculiar event in terms of its explicit religious aspect.

2 – It is important to note that Hindutva is like more plausibly modeled as a ethno-nationalist movement than a religious one. Also, I think it is illustrative that Sri Lankan Buddhist fundamentalists have sometimes been labelled ‘Protestant Buddhists,’ because of the influence of apologists who formed a neo-Buddhist movement and creed in explicit response to Protestant missionaries in the 19th century.