One of the problems with intellectual conversations is that they are generally restricted to intellectuals. By their nature intellectuals tend to value reflection and some semblance of comprehension and consistency. This is a “curved” scale; I’m not contending here that intellectuals really attain a very high absolute level of analytic clarity or coherency, but, the process itself tends result in a minimal baseline of plausibility to a propositional sequence.
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that the problem with attempting to understand human cognition as a sequence of inferences generated from propositions is that most people don’t even make the nominal attempt to engage in the act of deep reflection. The heuristics and biases which shape modal psychology are determined by a combination of intuition, custom and conformity. Paradoxes of inconsistency are no great issue when ideas and propositions have only a minimal level of contingency. Arguments are ad hoc and operationally instrumental. The aforementioned guides of intuition, custom and conformity hone mental reflexes which can be accessed rapidly and with reasonable surety, despite the lack of deep comprehension.
In most cases I don’t believe that the disjunction between the preferred ideal way that intellectuals reflect and the modal operation of human cognition is much of an issue. Intellectuals, or those who fancy themselves as such, might struggle with issues of ontology. But I do not believe that this is particularly on the radar of the typical individual whose concerns are more prosaic, the basic material and emotional comforts and securities of life. Confusions only emerge when institutions and systems aim to span the full gamut of conventional cognition. For example, in politics or religion, where intellectuals build systems which are very relevant to the lives of most humans. Because of the general obscurity of intellectual constructs to the “average Joe” there is a large body of literature which exists to make abstruse concepts “relevant” in everyday terms to everyday people (e.g., instead of “soteriology,” what is “God’s plan for you”).
Because of the chasm between those inclined to think, write and expound, and the typical human, I believe it is critical that we inspect the shape of what people actually believe, as opposed to what one might expect if they were idealized inferential machines. So with that, I will reproduce below the fold a selection of religious data from the Barna Group:

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Chad has a post up The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, where he goes on a rant against humanities academics and their blithe complacency in relation to their ignorance of science & mathematics. Two points….
1) One of the major issues with humanistically oriented intellectuals, I believe, is a lack of anthropological fluency with the culture of science. As a case in point, a contributor to the literary weblog The Valve dismissed my assertion that scholars who study science should have some immersion in scientific education at some point with the quip that experience with multiple choice tests wouldn’t add anything to their comprehension. The reduction and dismissal of even an undergraduate science education to multiple choice tests bespeaks a lack of awareness of what science coursework for those majoring in the sciences often consists of (i.e., solving problem sets, laboratories and undergraduate research).
2) One of the major issues with scientifically oriented intellectuals is that they attempt to translate scientific methods into humanistic domains where there just isn’t the proven return on investment at this point. Some forms of Marxism were an attempt to reduce history into a deterministic process controlled by a few parameters; I suspect that explains the attraction Marxism, and socialism more broadly, had for scientific intellectuals early in the 20th century. The hypoethico-deductive methodology which the scientifically educated are habituated to engaging in must be used very judiciously when examining humanistic questions. What exactly do general axiomatic theories have to tell us about the influence of Hellenistic motifs on early Umayyad art? How exactly has Theory really worked out for the humanities so far? Certainly an appreciation of art can be reduced ontologically to neuroscience, but the outcome of the Superbowl can also be reduced to quantum level dynamics. So?
Finally, I also don’t think that the attitude of humanists toward science is really one of superiority. I think it is pretty clear that today science is the queen of the intellectual enterprise, and within science physics is the gold standard by which other disciplines judge themselves. I think most of the bluster by non-scientists about their ignorance is rooted in some embarrassment, just as I think most non-physicists (this is mostly aimed toward biologists) know that they wish their own field had attained even a fraction of the power of physics in modeling the world around us.
Janet touches upon most of the hypotheses re: science vs. humanities….

Because of the increased prices in gasoline and the perception of scarcity in terms of power, there has been a lot of talk about nuclear. There have been many comments of late from the Right that the Left is opposed to the utilization of nuclear power, and often gleeful the observation that many European countries such as France and Sweden are highly reliant on this technology. But is it true that liberals are more averse to nuclear than conservatives? I checked the GSS for the following questions:
– Nuclear power dangerous to the environment?
– Likelihood of nuclear meltdown in 5 years?
– Nuclear power a danger to my family?
The tables below show the proportion of various ideologies in terms of responses to these questions. The responses to the left are more nuclear skeptical than those to the right.

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I’ve been reading Critique of Pure Reason and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the evenings. It should be no surprise that the former is a more tedious read than the latter, David Hume being the better stylist than Immanuel Kant. In faireness, one presumes that translation from the German might add some overhead in terms of obscurity (though I’ve heard that the German isn’t the model of clarity either). Nevertheless, I’m struck by the fact that Kant’s prose reminds me a great deal of Stephen Jay Gould. I think this is interesting because Gould drew so much inspiration from out of favor Germanic conceptions of biological processes and paradigms, in particular the importance of bauplan. An analog to Hume might be Richard Dawkins’, who if excessively simple in his formulation nevertheless gains in economy as a result.
P.S.: I haven’t read Hume since college, and I have to say I’m a lot less impressed than I once was. Dude was wrong a lot!

I’ve posted a fair amount about the new field of historical population genetics. Some of the most popular mass-market books in genetics deal with this field, for example Spencer Wells’ Journey of Man. On the other hand, there’s a lot of sloppy overreach on the part of some practitioners, especially due to the excessive reliance on uniparental lineages; the unbroken female and male lineages (mtDNA and NRY). Nevertheless, in specific narrow cases where hypotheses are being tested they can be very illuminating.
For example, here is a question: do the mixed-race populations of the Caribbean exhibit any evidence of descent from the indigenous pre-Columbian populations? This is an open question because it was in the Caribbean that the first and most extreme die-offs of native populations occurred when exposed to Eurasian pathogens. The short answer seems to be yes, some indigenous ancestry does persist into the present.
This was first confirmed in Puerto Rico, Reconstructing the population history of Puerto Rico by means of mtDNA phylogeographic analysis:

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Sandman has a post up, Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?, taking off on the PLoS Biology article, Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution. Read both. I would add one important point though: linguistic and biological evolution are simply subsets of evolutionary dynamics. That is why Martin Nowak’s book of that name, Evolutionary Dynamics, naturally has a section on the evolution of language. Several evolutionarily oriented thinkers have attempted to translate models originally developed for biology into the domain of culture. Cultural Transmission and Evolution and Culture and the Evolutionary Process are two works which I think are good introductions to the field.

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I posted before on Why scientists should do drugs (if they choose), via Tyler Cowen, a Jonah Lehrer article in The New Yorker:

Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to increase focus — one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of scientists and researchers regularly took prescription drugs to “enhance concentration” — but, accordingly to Jung-Beeman and Kounios, drugs may actually make insights less like, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity. “There’s a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their headquarters,” Kounios said. “I you want to encourage insights, then you’ve got to also encourage people to relax.” Jung-Beeman’s latest paper investigates why people who are in a good mood are so much better at solving insight puzzles. (On average, they solve nearly twenty percent more C.R.A. problems.)

In other words, what may make a more efficient engineer may also dampen creativity in a theoretical physicist….

Half Sigma points me to The Legend of a Heretic, which chronicles the close relationship between Robert G. Ingersoll, a prominent American agnostic of the 19th century, and the Republican Party elite of that time. It seems ironic that though we are a nation which explicitly bans formal religious tests, we live at a time where an implicit religious test exists. This despite the fact that Andrew Jackson was probably the first of our presidents who would be considered an orthodox Christian. But even as late as 1908 a Unitarian, William Howard Taft, was president (despite some grumblings about his unorthodox Christianity).

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I didn’t watch The Dark Knight this weekend. Anyone else out there?

How to blog, get tenure and prosper: Starting the blog. ‘nuf said.