1. First, a post from the past: The Round-Eyed Buddha.

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The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find the two GNXP weblogs on the world wide web pretty easily. And I feed the blog posts to two twitter accounts. I can see the value-add of Facebook’s selective semi-permeability when it comes to the “social graph”, but less so for websites which have a robust presence on the internet. GNXP in some form has been around for over 8 years. I can’t but help feel that this is a flashier Geocities fan page.

Also, it has a URL that’s easy to remember: http://www.facebook.com/GeneExpression

I have a long post reviewing Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Good book. In the process of blogging on the topic I found something kind of funny, but it was too immature to be posted there. I yanked some charts from Gallup Coexist 2009. Basically it shows differences among UK, France and Germany on social issues, as well as differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. In general Muslims are more socially conservative, though the gap is the least in France and the most in the UK. Here are the charts, with the last one the one I found funny:

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There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal). Depending on the measure you use (PPP or nominal) the difference between the USA and Mexico is in the range of a factor of 3.5 to 5. Until recently most Americans did not know much about Yemen. It was famous for being the homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father and the Queen of Sheba.

Let’s do some comparisons.

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Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79. Playboy has been in decline too.

HUMAN GENE COUNT: MORE THAN A CHICKEN, LESS THAN A GRAPE. Going under 20,000. Hey, it’s just a number, not the measure of a man.

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About six months ago I read a history of modern Italy and was struck by a passage which observed that during the early years of the Italian state none of the prominent political leaders were practicing Roman Catholics. Part of this was specific to the history of the rise of modern Italy, Umberto I fought the Papacy, and so alienated the institution of the Church from the royal house and the state over which it ruled. But more generally many of the nationalists of the 19th century in Catholic Europe were of an anti-clerical bent. Only with the reconciliation of the Roman Catholic Church with the modern liberal democratic nation-state in the 20th century, and universal suffrage, have the political elites come to resemble the populace more in their religious sensibilities in these nations. And before you dismiss this as a European matter, observe that Andrew Jackson, our sixth president, was the first to have personal religious views in line with the American majority. As late as William Howard Taft in the early 20th century the United States had a head of state who rejected orthodox Christianity (he was a Unitarian Christian). Can we imagine that such a thing would come to pass without much controversy today? Mitt Romney has famously had to elide the yawning chasm between Mormonism and Nicene Christianity to be a viable candidate.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the paths of the arrows of history are more complex than we perceive them in our own moment in time. It is ironic that we in the United States are living through a period of secularization at the grassroots, while at the same time having to deal with the fact that all high level politicians have to pass through a de facto religious litmus test of relatively stringent orthodoxy. The complexity of this sort of social phenomenon makes it exceedingly difficult to analyze and characterize in a pithy fashion. Too often when scholars and intellectuals speak of the history of religion they impose their own visions on the flux of human belief and behavior. Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth is not such an argument. Rather, it is a cautious work which makes recourse to both robust theoretical models as well as a wide and rich set of empirical data. Kaufmann casts a very wide net in his attempt to retrieve a useful catch in terms of plausible and robust predictions. The central idea of the book is derived from the fact that the endogenous growth rates of religious segments of developed societies can often be rather high. The broader implication is that history moves in cycles, and that the current age of secularism is nearing its peak, and inevitable demographic forces will see the tide retreat.

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Glenn Beck said some dumb, but unsurprising, things about evolution:

How many people believe in evolution in this country? I’d like to see. I mean, I don’t know why it’s unreasonable to say this. I’m not God so I don’t know how God creates. I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a half-monkey, half-person yet. Did evolution just stop? Did we all of sudden — there’s no other species that’s developing into half-human?

It’s like global warming. So I don’t know why it is so problematic for people to just so, I don’t know how God creates. I don’t know how we got here. If I get to the other side and God’s like, “You know what, you were a monkey once,” I’ll be shocked, but I’ll be like, “Whatever.”

First, Glenn Beck is an adult convert to the Mormon religion. Therefore if he is exalted to godhood he could create a universe of half-monkeys/half-men for kicks. Second, note the details of Beck’s background. He was raised Roman Catholic, and secular for most of his adulthood, before coming to the Mormon church. None of these affinities entails a rejection of evolution. You are probably well aware that the Roman Catholic church has made its peace, broadly speaking, with evolution. And there’s nothing about secularism which necessitates a rejection of evolution. But what about Mormonism? This is the peculiarity. Mormons are broadly sympathetic to Creationism, but there’s nothing in the religion’s teachings which imply this as being the orthodox position. This is why Mitt Romney can robustly support the teaching of evolution. So what’s going in?

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My DonorsChoose page. Compared to previous years I’m kind of under-performing. I haven’t done any PBS-like incentives before, but perhaps I should. For example, anyone who gives $250 is owed a post from me on a topic of their choice of at least 2,000 words excluding quotations within the next 3 months. Those are just stray numbers thrown out there, but anyone interested? You’d have to rely on my good faith obviously, as I’m the final arbiter as to whether I’m gaming the metrics, but I’m an honest person about these sorts of things. It would probably be reasonable to do a graduated scale above a minimum threshold too.

Achievement gap achieved household status a decade ago. Seems like the rise of high-stakes testing means that “the gap” is now in widespread circulation as a meme…but I doubt most people know the quantitative details. According to the The Journal of Black Education in 2006 ~48,000 whites scored above a 700 on the Verbal SAT, while ~1,200 blacks did. For the math the figures were ~55,500 and ~1,100. A 700 is about at the 25th percentile of a Harvard undergraduate.

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One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the Indian cultural world, so the Himalayas bound it on the north. Unlike many pre-modern constructions, such as the eastern boundary of Europe, the northern limit of South Asia is relatively clear and distinct. It is stark on a relief map; the flat Gangetic plain gives way to mountains. And it is stark a cultural map, the languages of northern India give way to those of the world of Tibet. The religion of northern India gives way to the Buddhism of Tibet. In terms of human geography I believe that one can argue that the Himalayan fringe around South Asia exhibits the greatest change of ancestrally informative gene frequencies over the smallest distance when you exclude those regions separated by water barriers. Unlike the Sahara the transect from the northern India to Chinese Tibet at any given point along the border is permanently inhabited, albeit sparsely at the heights.

And yet despite the geographical barriers people and ideas did move across the Himalaya. The cultural influences upon Tibet from India are obvious. The script of Tibet is derived from India, while its form of Buddhism is the direct descendant of the last efflorescence of that religion in northern India. But while culture moved north, I do not see much evidence genetically that South Asians have been significant as an influence. This is somewhat shocking when you realize these two facts: the population of the Tibetan Autonomous Region is on the order of 5-6 million, while that of northern South Asia around ~1 billion (including Pakistan and Bangladesh). A 200-fold difference. And yet there is evidence of admixture between the two groups exactly where you’d expect: in Nepal. Below is a figure from a recent paper which shows how South and East Asian populations relate to each other. I’ve highlighted the Nepali groups, which span the two larger classes:

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Courtesy of Robin Hanson, I see that The Atlantic has an excellent article on medical knowledge:

One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

Salanti remained poised, as if the grilling were par for the course, and gamely acknowledged that the suggestions were all good—but a single study can’t prove everything, she said. Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began? “Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile. Everyone nodded. Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted?

This discussion reminded me of Jim Manzi’s earlier essay. There, he argued that the Social Sciences were so far behind the hard sciences because of the problem of causal density. Without the benefits of randomization and experimentation available in the physical sciences, it’s hard to figure out causality — or so Manzi argues.

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