More people related science.

A 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 we are born with” (p.91). Belief in God is “natural,” resulting from the “natural workings of the human mind,” and atheism is thus unnatural (p.108). David Wilson (2002) suggests that religion is part of humanity’s naturally evolving adaptive strategy, and that religious belief represents “the healthy functioning of the biologically and culturally well-adapted human mind” (p.228). Michael Persinger (1987) has stressed the role of the hippocampus, the amygdala, temporal lobes, and hormonal processes, in explaining religious belief in God. Ashbrook and Albright (1997) focus on the neural underpinnings and workings of the brain in explaining belief in God. Newberg and D-Aquili (2001) argue that the religious impulse lies in an evolved “neurological process” (p.9), that the roots of belief in God are to be found in “the wiring of the human brain” (p.129), and that “as long as our brains are arranged the way they are,” belief in God will remain (p.172).
The data presented in this chapter delivers a heavy blow to this new explanation of theism. First of all, the sheer numbers must be contended with. With between 500,000,000 and 750,000,000 non-theists living on this planet today, any suggestion that belief in God is natural, inborn, or a result of how our brains are wired becomes manifestly untenable. Secondly, anyone who argues that theism has neural roots and is a direct result of the natural way human minds work must then explain the dramatically different rates of belief among similar countries. Consider Britain (31-44% atheist) compared to nearby Ireland (4-5% atheist), the Czech Republic (54-61% atheist) compared to nearby Poland (3-6% atheist), and South Korea (30-52% atheist) compared the Philippines (less than 1% atheist). It is simply unsustainable to argue that these glaring differences in rates of atheism among these nations is due to different biological, neurological or other such brain-related properties. Rather, the differences are better explained by taking into account historical, cultural, economic, political, and sociological factors (Norris and Inglehart, 2004; Grontenhuis and Scheepers, 2001; Verweij, Ester, and Natua, 1997; Zuckerman, 2003).

I object to this characterization of the idea that theism is ‘natural’ and atheism is ‘unnatural.’ A minor point is that Justin L. Barrett believes that the growth of atheism is predominantly due to social forces (I asked him). I don’t think the above quote would give that impression. But a bigger issue vague and imprecise way that the author above uses the term “innate.”

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Chris of Mixing Memory is now a Christian. Just so you know. It was reading Kierkegaard that pushed him over the edge. He just told me via IM. You think Chris is an idiot now, right J-Dog?

Genetic Variability, Economic Behavior and the Formation of Social Norms: The Case of European Alcohol Consumption

Alcohol consumption patterns vary across Europe. Northern Europeans frequently engage in excessive drinking in social situations (EDSS), behavior less common in southern Europe. We develop a model to explore whether these behavioral differences could be rooted in genetic variations across Europe and then compounded by social reinforcement mechanisms. Our results suggest conditions exist in which EDSS can emerge as a strategy in a larger fraction of the population than is genetically predisposed to EDSS. Implications for the current effort to harmonize alcohol policy across the European Union are explored.

You can read the full working paper yourself. They don’t seem to take into account superior southern European alcohol metabolization, but they do point out that northern Europeans are likely to be innately shyer. Alternative title: “Why Finns get shit-faced.”

Open thread for links to science blogs of interest that aren’t well known yet. Your own blog is fine too. I’ll post the most interesting ones (to me) below the fold on an update to boost the pagerank for google.

Some blogs:

Phil Downey
Back Reaction
Agricultural Biodiversity

Update: Julian O’Dea.

Chris of Mixing Memory has a review of a paper which confirms the finding that East Asians think more holistically than Westerners. Specifically, East Asians often tend to look at context, while Westerners focus more specifically on the object of interest. In this case this model seemed to fall in light with the fact that East Asians, specifically Japanese, seemed to see wider web of repercussions for events, while Europeans tended to look at things in a more narrow frame, both temporally and in regards to social networks and what not. This is not a new field. Three years ago I reviewed Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought, which made the same arguments based on the author’s research. But, some qualifications need to be made: the paper above uses Japanese and Americans whites as exemplars of the two categories. Nisbett found an important geographical pattern: in terms of “analytic” vs. “holistic” thought, and a whole range of attitudes, English speaking cultures tended to be at one pole, and East Asians at another, with contintental Europeans in the middle. Additionally, most non-Europeans clustered with East Asians. This is important, because of course readers of this weblog will want to consider a possible innate genetic element to these cross-cultural differences. Obviously continent Europeans are not phylogenetically equidistant between East Asians and English speaking whites! Additionally, Nisbett found (and this is confirmed by Judith Richard Harris in No Two Alike) individuals of Asian ancestry raised in the United States clustered with other Americans, not with Asians. Significantly, individuals who arrived in North America (some subjects were Canadian, poor souls) during their teenage years from Asia (China) tended to exhibit cognitive styles which were hybridized between Western and Eastern modes. Finally, Nisbett found that citizens of Hong Kong (a former British colony) were particularly adept at “switching” between cognitive modes dependent on context, and, he found individuals from both cultures could be “trained” to think in the opposite mode relatively easily.

This is not to say that no differences in allele frequencies with behavior/cultural impact exist between the groups. Consider the variation in the frequency of DRD4 & MAOA across populations. But the differences are not, I suspect, going to be as easy as tallying up character differences between populations when cultural plasticity, along with wild cards like Toxoplasma gondii, are important components of the variance. Finally, I do have to wonder as to the popularity of analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American world, vs. “Continental” philosophy in places like France.

Discover is doing a “25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time” list. The great thing about stuff like this is it gets you thinking, talking, and exposes what your priorities are. There isn’t a canonical list with a clear rank order. I mean, yeah, Principia is the bomb, but people can make a case for The Origin of Species. Below is the list from Discover, and below the fold my quick & dirty re-order. Hope it tells you something about me.

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I think I once complained that there is no good collection of J. B. S. Haldane’s technical papers in genetics (as distinct from his popular articles). If I did, I retract the complaint, as I find that there is already a very good collection: Selected genetics papers of J. B. S. Haldane, edited with an introduction by Krishna R. Dronamraju, Garland Publishing, NY, 1990. This is a big book (over 500 pages), containing most of Haldane’s classic papers on the Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection, and many others. Incidentally, it is sometimes said that these classic papers are ‘reprinted’ in an Appendix to Haldane’s book The Causes of Evolution (1932), but this is hardly accurate. The Appendix contains only a brief summary of Haldane’s main findings.

I must also retract another complaint. In a post on Haldane’s Dilemma I said that there was a misprint in one of the formulae in Haldane’s 1957 paper on the ‘Cost of Natural Selection’: a vital division stroke appeared to be omitted. I was therefore interested to see that in the reprint of the paper in Dronamraju’s collection the division stroke is present where it should be. At first I thought that this must be an editorial correction, but this seemed odd because the reprint appeared to be a photographic copy. So I looked up the original printed version of the paper (in Journal of Genetics 1957), and found that the division stroke was there all along.

My error arose from relying on a pdf copy of Haldane’s paper on the internet (see link in my earlier post). In the pdf file there is no trace whatever of the division stroke – not a single pixel – even at the highest magnification. So I am gratified to find that I was correct to find an error in the formula as it appeared in the pdf copy, but alarmed to find that a seemingly good pdf copy can be unreliable in this way. It is puzzling because other division strokes in the same paper have come out clearly enough.

This NPR story about the anti-immigrant backlash in Denmark is pretty interesting. How you feel about it, well, that would depend on your perspective. I see no alternative to Danish “tough love” myself. A brown-skinned immigrant I am you say? Well yes, true that. But, aside from the non-trivial point that my loyalty lay with the traditions of the West (and that includes some irrational ones I suppose), I am of the opinion that assimilationism needs to be kick-started and I reject strongly Western cultural flaccidity that has been spawned by multiculturalism. Yes, racism is bad, I’ve experienced it, but there is a world filled with billions of brown faces who would accept me if it got too bad here (assuming I bowed to the right Gods and what not, not all brown people are alike!). I like to keep my options open and maintain diversity. No reason Denmark needs to turn into Dhaka, Dhaka will still be there.

When I was a kid, back in the day, I read up to book 6 of The Wheel of Time. It seemed that after book 3 the series went into an exponential decay of quality…and I couldn’t handle the flat female characters and I ditched in book 6. Well, turns out that he’s churned out 11 books total. A friend of mine once joked about “Egwene’s Paradox,” which was a variant of Zeno’s Paradox. Basically, one of the main characters (Egwene) had a destination, and as she proceeded her velocity dropped in every single book so that she would never reach the terminus. Well, I hear she did reach her goal, though I also read one book followed only one day!
Anyway, so the main point here is that Jordan was diagnosed with a heart condition. The median life expectancy is 4 years. He’s working on the concluding book to his saga. Who would have thought it ended like this?