A good critique of my posts which explored the correlates of Biblical literacy. It isn’t surprising that some transformations make the relationship clearer….

Five years ago Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek‘s International Edition editor, splashed onto the public intellectual scene with The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. It’s somewhat heterodox, at least for the mainstream, observation that liberal democracy is more than simple majoritarianism, earned him some notoriety. Enough so that he could receive a fawning profile in New York Magazine. But while five years ago Fareed promoted some rather academically well known but transgressive ideas about the necessity for institutional, economic and cultural supports for a flourishing democratic polity, in The Post-American World he plays the role of the golden-tongued expositor of conventional wisdom. The basic thesis of the The Post-American World is that as the 21st century proceeds the United States will have to resituate itself in a multi-player world where it is the most powerful actor, instead of being the only agent on stage. China & India rise, globalization brings wealth, terrorism is a manageable, and no longer being #1 in every metric does not imply decline. The big picture is dime-a-dozen, but Fareed’s fleshing out of the argument is littered with facts which shed light on subtle points in regards to the precise dynamics across which the arc of history will be played out.

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My two posts on religion & IQ/education are getting a lot of attention. I didn’t spend more than 30 minutes on both entries combined, so the attention to unit time invested ratio is rather out of wack. Doing some digging it’s funny how interested people are in this topic, while at the same time being totally disinclined to do their own leg work. Multiple message boards have also pointed to another similar survey which shows the relationship between religiosity and IQs in international comparisons. You might be amused to find out that I wrote that up in 30 minutes 5 years ago as a joke! All the data is real, I didn’t make it up, but in all honesty I connect these particular dots to see peoples’ prejudices slam up against their anti-prejudices. Most atheists are Good Enlightened people who are often skeptical of IQ tests because Good Enlightened people know that standardized tests are false (except of course in the cases where they make sure everyone knows their really high standardized test score while at the same time admitting that it “doesn’t mean anything….”). But atheists also generally believe that religious people, especially fundamentalists, are stupid and lacking in reasoning capabilities. So how about pointing out that religious fundamentalists don’t do as well on tests which supposedly measure reasoning ability? If you track some of the reaction on the message boards you see repeated instances of excitement and glee before someone pipes up to remind the assembled godless that “IQ isn’t a valid measure of intelligence.” Gosh darnit!
For the record, I believe IQ and standardized tests in general have predictive power. I also don’t believe in God.
In any case, a few people have questioned the relationship between education & Biblical literalism. I’ve pointed out that that’s a pretty robust trend over many decades, but I’ll offer some quick “proof.” Then I’ll repost some data I found in regards to elites and their religious affiliations and views which might interest.

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The debate over at The American Scene on Jim Manzi’s article “Undetermined” is now closed to comments so I couldn’t respond to one of the comments but the beauty of being a blogger is that you can use your own forum to vent your response.

The comment that I desperately wanted to respond to was left by Joe Shipman and reads as follows:

One thing that is established beyond any possibility of scientific doubt, of course, is that the genetic variability in IQ within races is much larger than the variability between races; any ethnic group of nontrivial size will have plenty of smart people and plenty of dumb people, and basing, say, educational policy on group rather than individual characteristics is therefore not only unAmerican but scientifically misguided.

Joe, will you join with me in advocating the complete dismantling of efforts to ameliorate the racial and gender wage gaps that exist, in that they too demonstrate that wage variability is larger within groups than between groups? I hit on this topic a few years ago:

It is important to recognize that most wage inequality occurs within and not between groups. The unweighted average Gini coefficient across all race, gender, and education groups was 0.256 in 1995, over 80 percent of the total Gini. Put another way, if all groups had identical mean wage rates (for example, black male dropouts had the same average wages as white male college graduates) but wages differed within groups as they do today, nearly all the inequality in wage rates would remain.

You know, if it’s unAmerican and unscientific to craft social policy on observed group differences then surely the fact that the variability in Black or Hispanic incomes is greater within their groups than it is between their group and, say, Caucasians or Asians, is an unscientific and unAmerican basis upon which to craft social policy to address the between group differences in income. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right Joe?

Current Vitamin D Recommendations Fraction Of Safe, Perhaps Essential Levels For Children:

The current recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D for children is 200 International Units (IUs), but new research reveals that children may need and can safely take ten-times that amount. According to new research this order-of-magnitude increase could improve the bone health of children worldwide and may have other long-term health benefits.

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Via Reihan, Instapaper. Need to not get behind on my Tech Crunch feed….

Via Reihan, Instapaper. Need to not get behind on my Tech Crunch feed….

(any other “life hacks” you know of?)

A few weeks ago I mentioned that there is some debate as to the taxonomy of the Polar Bear; specifically, as to whether it was simply a clade of the Brown Bear species. Interesting, I note that today a Polar Bear-Grizzly hybrid was shot in Canada:

There have long been stories of oddly coloured bears living in regions where the two territories overlap.
But until now, grizzly-polar hybrids, dubbed “grolar bears” or “pizzlies”, have been found only in zoos.
The hybrid bear was shot last month by an American big game hunter on Banks Island, Northwest Territories, Canada.
His guide, Roger Kuptana, noticed the creature had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly bear and thought it might be a hybrid.
The body was seized by officials, who sent a DNA sample for tests which confirmed its unusual origins.

If this is not a “one-off” or sterile hybrid that leaves the opening for gene flow between these populations.

Segment 3 on PRI’s To the Best of our Knowledge.

The post below where I show that belief in the literal truth of the Biblical tends to correlate well with IQ scores from the General Social Survey on a denominational scale is getting a lot of response; enough of it is of low quality that I’ll close the comment thread soon enough. As I observed the “truth” which I had extracted out of the data is rather banal; I doubt it surprised anyone that a “fundamentalist” attitude toward religious scripture tends to be associated with low cognitive ability. The correlation here is probably not one of simple causality in either direction. It seems the most plausible model is one which notes that various denominations tend to have particular socioeconomic profiles which shape a general cultural outlook. In the American South this was made most explicit, with a rank order of status from Episcopalians, to Presbyterians, to Methodists, to Baptists, and finally on down to marginal sectarians. These denominations tend to run in families, but, one may change denomination with relative ease in the United States in comparison to other nations. According to The American Religious Identification Survey reports that 16% of the adult population changes their affiliation during their lifetime. This level of churn is also probably not random; those who change their socioeconomic status may “trade up” or “trade down” in their church so as to feel more comfortable among their peers. I like to point out that the presidential candidate and wealthy lawyer John Edwards was raised a Baptist, but switched to Methodism as an adult. This is probably partially a reflection of his class status shift as well as his social liberalism. In contrast, though George W. Bush was raised an Episcopalian, he now worships in a Methodist church. This is a pretty good illustration of Bush’s reinvention of himself as Middle American despite his patrician New England origins.

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