Just noticed something weird. Seems like around 20% of atheists in the United States self-identify as a member of a religion. By atheist, I mean someone who states that they “Do not believe in God.” 19% of Buddhists are atheists. 10% of Jews. 5% of Muslims and Hindus. 9% of “Other Faiths.” And of course, 22% of the Unaffiliated (those without a religious identification). To get to my 20% number I just went to the Pew US Religious Landscape Survey, checked belief in God by religion and cross-referenced with the proportion within the sample of each religion. I think it’s a rather peculiar situation that the same proportion of atheists are religious as non-religious are atheists! Chart and data below the fold….

	% atheist	% in population	% atheist X % in population
Evangelical	0	26.3	0.0
Mainline	1	18.1	18.1
Historically Black	0	6.9	0.0
Catholic	1	23.9	23.9
Mormon	0	1.7	0.0
Orthodox	4	0.7	2.8
Jehovah’s Witness	0	0.6	0.0
Other Christian	1	0.3	0.3
Jew	10	1.7	17
Muslim	5	0.7	3.5
Buddhism	19	0.6	11.4
Hindu	5	0.4	2
Other Faith	9	1.2	10.8
Unaffiliated	22	16.1	354.2

Islam on Campus: A survey of UK student opinions. N = 632 for Muslims. Remember that this is an elite sample of the youth insofar as they’re polling university students.

You might wonder what exactly Sharia law is in regarding to apostasy. Perhaps these students have a different interpretation than the majority consensus that apostates should be killed. Well….

In other words, 1 out of 33 Muslim British university students believe that apostates should be killed. Little wonder that many Europeans feel a little Islamophobia….
Additionally,
* Muslims have far less respect for atheists than non-Muslims
* Muslims have far less respect for homosexuals than non-Muslims
* Muslims are much more likely to think that it is acceptable to kill in the name of religion than non-Muslims
Details below….

Read More

Tropic Thunder is worth watching again at a matinee price just for a closer observation of Tom Cruise’s scenes.
Pineapple Express is not worth a matinee price.

Hey, so everyone’s saying that it’s Biden. From my rather politically uncomitted and unobsessed perspective, one word: anti-climactic.

My previous post, Weird lands of the tails, had some concepts implicit which I didn’t elucidate in detail. For example, I assumed that the speed is a quantitative trait, and the many genes which control its variation have pleiotropic effects. That is, gene 1 has effect on phenotypes 1 through n. Gene 2 has effect on phenotype 1 through n. Speed may be just one of those phenotypes. More formally what I’m thinking about is a genetic variance-covariance matrix, or G matrix. If you keep the G matrix in mind I think it’s kind of ludicrous to expect that speed was actually what was being selected for directly; but that’s just me.
If you want to know more about the G matrix, Comparative quantitative genetics: evolution of the G matrix is a good paper. Also check out The multivariate breeder’s equation. There’s a lot of talk about going beyond one-gene models and the retarded concepts which arise from them, but if people are serious about that, well, start looking into quantitative genetics and refine your mental models….

Yesterday’s post on the speed of Jamaican sprinters, and Genetic Future’s skepticism of a one-gene answer for their dominance. The discussion brought up some adaptive talk; I’m not against adaptation, and I think it’s entirely plausible that populations differ enough in the distribution of phenotypes that there are different genetic potentialities…but, I have some issues with the intersection of the two in this particular case. Here’s my logic….

Read More

Reading up on the MC1R, I came across this nice summary of work I mentioned before on the genetics of coat color in the dog. The summary includes the figure below, which is a pretty intuitive illustration of a few of the genes involved in pigment type-switching (ie. production of eumelanin versus pheomelanin). The caption:

Production of yellow versus black pigment in dogs is controlled by three genes: Mc1r, Agouti, and CBD103. Dogs carrying wild-type alleles for all three genes have a yellow coat resulting from Agouti antagonism of Mc1r signaling in melanocytes (yellow Great Dane, top). Dogs carrying a loss-of-function mutation at Mc1r have a yellow coat, regardless of their genotype at Agouti or CBD103 (yellow Labrador Retriever, middle). Dogs carrying wild-type alleles for Mc1r and Agouti, together with the dominant black allele of CBD103 (KB) have a black coat resulting from the interaction between a beta-defensin and Mc1r (black Curly Coated Retriever, bottom).

I haven’t been watching the Olympics, but my news feeds are broad enough that I get a general sense of who is winning, and who is not. Over at Genetic Future Dan MacArthur has a post up, The gene for Jamaican sprinting success? No, not really:

And Bolt is not the only Jamaican to impress in short distance events in Beijing: the country’s women’s sprint team took all three medals in their 100 metre dash.
Naturally, these performances have provoked widespread speculation about the basis of Jamaica’s sprinting success, and the short-distance prowess of other populations of West African ancestry. One controversial suggestion has drawn the most headlines: that sprinting is in their genes, or rather in one gene in particular – variously referred to as “Actinen A” or “ACTN3”.

In the spirit of the games, Daniel MacArthur has an extensive post up on ACTN3 and the genetic endowments of elite sprinters. Well worth a read.

The first correct daily temperature forecast was not broadcast [in China] until July 1999. Previously, temperature predictions were never permitted to fall outside the range for efficient factory work.

That’s from Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture, by Eric Jones. Jones is best known for his book The European Miracle, an anti-Pomeranz text if there ever was one. In Cultures Merging, he provides decent anecdotal evidence that while “bad culture” might be able to hold back a country back a little, cultures are actually fairly fluid over the span of decades, and tend to steer in the direction of economic efficiency (a point emphasized by Clark). Jones’s pet example is East Asia, where Confucianism was once said to be a barrier to economic development (too much blind obedience to the dead hand of hierarchy) but is now lauded as the driving force behind superior “Asian Values” of hard work and sacrifice.

The first half of the book (parts one and two of four total) can be easily recommended to those interested in the culture question. Lots of stories, some big-think, some bold generalizations. The second half is filled with stories about his Asian graduate students; not sure what that’s all about.

But while it’s fun to read books about culture, it sure would be nice to bring some rigor to the debate, wouldn’t it? My preference–typical for an economist–is to look for the key under the lamppost of things we can actually measure. Lynn and Vanhanen’s national average IQ measures spring to mind–and boy are those scores ever robust as predictors of national economic outcomes. And Jones and Schneider show that even if you control for “cultural” variables like Confucianism, Islam, or Buddhism, the nation’s average IQ is still a strong predictor of economic performance. High-IQ groups are likely to have some good cultural traits like patience, cooperativeness, and a tendency to agree with economists on the merits of untrammeled competition.

What’d be nice to know at this point is “What’s left after you control for national average IQ?” Do cultural variables (as measured in, say, the World Values Survey) still have predictive power? It might be all stems and seeds, but right now we don’t know. Sure would be nice if someone out there did some research into this….