Culture
razib | August 29, 2009There's a new paper in PLoS ONE, Craniometric Data Supports Demic Diffusion Model for the Spread of Agriculture into Europe. That's fine. There are two extreme models about how farming might have spread in Europe. One model suggests that farmers replaced non-farmers genetically. Another model posits that there was no discernible movement of population, but ideas flowed. Apes are not the only ones who can imitate and emulate after all. Peruvians did not move with the potato, so there are cases of the latter. But the genetic data (see links) seem to imply some non-trivial contribution (for…
razib | August 24, 2009Lawyers for Broker in Madoff Case Call U.S. Suits Unfair:
"What the commission has done here to Robert Jaffe is simply unfair," the defense motion argued. "The agency has called him a cheat, a knowing participant in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Yet, it has failed to back up these charges with factual allegation
I think using broad-brush terms like "unfair" which aren't precise & legal is probably not a good move. Life isn't fair, and many people screwed by Bernie Madoff will never be made whole. That's not fair, but that's reality.
razib | August 24, 2009Dienekes points to a new paper, Amerindian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups predominate in the population of Argentina: towards a first nationwide forensic mitochondrial DNA sequence database:
The study presents South American mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from selected north (N = 98), central (N = 193) and south (N = 47) Argentinean populations. Sequence analysis of the complete mtDNA control region (CR, 16024-576) resulted in 288 unique haplotypes ignoring C-insertions around positions 16193, 309, and 573; the additional analysis of coding region single nucleotide polymorphisms enabled a fine…
razib | August 23, 2009Or at least that's the joke. Interesting post from Tom Rees which illustrates the utility of cross-cultural tests of general theories-of-religion. Rees notes:
One of the leading theories of why religion is so popular goes by the ominous name of 'Terror Management Theory'. Put simply, this is the idea that people turn to religion to ease their fear of death.
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While Christians did indeed have a lower death anxiety than the non-religious, Muslims did not. In fact, their death anxiety was markedly higher than both the other groups.
When the participants were asked to explain why they felt the…
razib | August 23, 2009Arnold Kling mulls over various options when it comes to tacking the American national debt. Here's the one which is out "get-out-jail-free" card:
2. Technology to the rescue. Some major technologies, probably either wet or dry nanotech, produce so much economic growth that the ratio of debt to GDP stays under control. I give this a 20 percent chance. Sometimes I think the chances are higher, maybe even 50 percent. It's a difficult estimate to make--today, I'm in a mood to say 20 percent.
I think information technology is great, but at some point we probably need to increase productivity more…
razib | August 23, 2009In the post below I combined some of the Census Regions for reasons of sample size. But I decided to do this again without combining, but removing some of the questions because of small sample sizes. Again, I also limited the sample to whites between 1998-2008.
But, I added another category: blacks. Michael Lind said:
Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or…
razib | August 22, 2009UK Sikhs accuse BBC of racism:
"We should not be paying a licence fee for promoting the ignorance-based ramblings of those bent on self-promotion who sneer at Asian religion and culture," said Hardeep Singh, a spokesman of the Sikh Media Monitoring Group, which accused BBC's Asian Network of being insensitive towards listeners from the minority community.
The Sikh Group has written to the BBC asking for a full transcript of Adil Ray's show, which was removed from their website after threats from angry Sikh listeners who accused the popular Muslim presenter of denigrating the "kirpan" dagger…
razib | August 22, 2009Update: Follow up post.
This Michael Lind piece bemoaning liberal contempt for white Southerners made me want to look a bit deeper and compare interregional differences and similarities. I went into the General Social Survey and limited responses to whites only and compared by region. The regions in the GSS are those of the US Census:
I combined New England & Mid Atlantic as the Northeast, the North Central regions as the Midwest, Mountain and Pacific as the West, and finally the other three regions as the South. Results below....
Northeast Midwest South…
razib | August 20, 2009A question below:
I'm curious about the demographics of this category, specifically their geographic distribution, religion and ethnicity.
First, I limited the sample to whites to remove confounds of ethnicity. Interestingly, in the GSS in the period between 1998-2008 24% of black Democrats/lean Democrats considered themselves conservatives, as opposed to 18% of whites. This surprised me, I generally remove blacks from he GSS sample in politics so had no data to fill in the gap where intuition lay. It does reiterate my suspicion that personal assertions of political ideology are less…
razib | August 20, 2009Question below about the details of what conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans might believe, etc. I decided to look for a few questions. I removed Independents because their sample sizes are a bit smaller. I clustered all those with socioeconomic status 17-47 as "Low" and those from 47-98 as "High." Again, I limited the sample to whites & the years 1998-2008.
Dem Repub
High Low High Low
Yes – Abortion on Demand Liberal 74.8 57.5 52.9 41.6…
razib | August 19, 2009It was a pleasure to hear Tom Rees, one of my favorite religion & data bloggers, on Thinking Allowed, one of my regular podcasts. Epiphenom is of particular interest because Tom Rees offers up original data and analysis, instead of anecdote laced speculation. As they say, if you enjoy Thinking Allowed, you might also be interested in In Our Time....
razib | August 18, 2009Rod Dreher is aghast at the fact that Americans don't assent to the views of "orthodox" Christianity. The problem that many secular and religious people on the extremes don't get (the anti-devout and the devout) is the cognitive complexity, and, frankly, the fundamental incoherency of the religious beliefs of most humans. In The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation the authors report survey data from the early 1980s which shows that most American Christians would not definitely deny that Hindus could achieve salvation:
Missouri Lutheran
South. Baptist…
razib | August 17, 2009Check this out from Google Trends:
Did Facebook hit an inflection point in early 2009? Google must have much better data sets, probably one reason Hal Varian left Berkeley for Google.
razib | August 17, 2009Matthew Stewart in The Big Money, How To Become a Management Guru in Five Easy Steps:
The industry that Tom Peters founded succeeded largely by sticking to the formula devised by America's pioneering preachers. In a sense, Peters brought management theory back home, by reuniting it with a much broader and deeper spiritual tradition that dates from the earliest days of the American republic. To be sure, the management theory before Peters had always had religion, but its religion was a hieratic one. It came down from a priesthood on high--from popelike figures such as Frederick Winslow Taylor…
drorzel | August 17, 2009I mentioned a few times that one of our physics graduates from 2008 was spending a year in rural Uganda, working at a clinic and school there as part of a college-run fellowship program (with Engeye Health Clinic. Steve is back in the US now, and headed to graduate school in Seattle in Atmospheric Sciences.
Steve's replacement in Uganda turns out to be another physics major, Tom Perry, who is now in Uganda and blogging about it. This is purely coincidence, by the way-- there's nothing physics-specific about the position, we just happened to have two really good physics majors in consecutive…
razib | August 16, 2009Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great deal of Heyman's thesis is grounded in rather conventional behavior genetic insights. In short, a behavioral trait can have a host of inputs, and is often a combination of environment & genes developing over a lifetime. Alcoholism is not much of an issue among observant Mormons because of their environment, not their genes. Heyman points out that whereas some…
razib | August 14, 2009Over at Why Evolution Is True Greg Mayer wonders:
I also recalled that the percentage of religiously unaffiliated had gone up noticeably from 1990 to 2008, and that another survey found the percentage was higher among young people. What could have happened so that younger people, growing up in the 90s and 00s, would be less religious? And then it occurred to me: 9/11. Something finally happened which gave religion a bad name. This was forcefully expressed at the time (here, here, and here) by Richard Dawkins.
The the fact that the % of Americans who aver "No Religion" has increased…
razib | August 13, 2009Woman Tells of Affair With Madoff in New Book:
Hadassah, the Jewish volunteer organization, knew it had invested $40 million with Bernard L. Madoff by the late 1990s. It also knew it had taken more than $130 million from its Madoff accounts and still had millions on the books when the vast Ponzi scheme was revealed in December.
What the charity says it did not know, however, was that Sheryl Weinstein, its chief financial officer when it made those investments, was having an affair with Mr. Madoff.
Ms. Weinstein, who has been married for 37 years, discloses that relationship in "Madoff's Other…
razib | August 13, 2009A helpful invasive species?:
Introduced species can wreak havoc on the ecosystems they invade. But what happens after they've been established for centuries? A new study in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society suggests that, in one case, an introduced species has actually become an important part of the native ecosystem -- and helps protect native species from another invader [$-a].
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Recently a news article in Nature discussed ragamuffin earth [$-a] -- the idea that human interference in nature has so dramatically changed natural systems that it may often be impossible to restore "…