
Belief in Evolution versus National Wealth - ColinWright
http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/archive/?c=559
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dantillberg
There doesn't appear to be much motivation for using anything other than a
linear regression on this, and the result would be a lot flatter than the
trend line given.

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ssivark
A linear regression would be theoretically wonky, since the Y-axis is upper
bounded at 100%. So, by the time the graph hits values like 80%, it should
start to get "saturated" and flatten out. This fit, with A approximately 100
does a good job of that.

Clearly, the fit is bad near the origin (for small purchasing power), so maybe
one can expect a modification at small values of x; I'm not sure if that that
will correspond to small values of y.

~~~
stdbrouw
The line of an ordinary least squares fit would go from approximately 50% on
the left to 70% on the right or maybe a little bit less steep than that.

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conistonwater
Much of the variation in how people respond to "Humans evolved from earlier
species" seems to be due to whether their particular culture/religion requires
them to take a specific view on the subject [1]. If it does, people answer in
line with their culture/religion, rather than science. In effect,
questionnaires like this end up studying what particular religions have to say
on the matter, and it just happens that the US cultures/religions are more
backwards (less accepting of science) than others.

The fit of A(1-B/x) through the scatterplot is kind of misleading too. Apart
from Turkey and USA, the whole plot is more like 2 or 3 clusters, which are
already highlighted, and the actual relationship with GDP per capita is much
weaker than implied by the fit curve. Look at the actual points: the colours
(country location) contain most of the information, and the fit curve doesn't
add much information.

[1]
[http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/](http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/)

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myth_buster
The eastern block countries if I'm not mistaken practice Christianity so I
don't think religion is as crucial a factor.

~~~
Mikeb85
Yup but they practice Orthodox Christianity which has no issue with taking an
allegorical view of some of the details of the creation story (Catholics are
like this too, to a degree).

Fundamentalists/evangelicals are a minority in the Christian world, and are to
Christianity what the Salafists/Wahhabists are to Islam...

~~~
nzp
I'm not sure about that. Orthodox Christianity is pretty strict about that
kind of stuff. I strongly doubt any Orthodox priest or monk with authority
would say that there's any allegory in the creation story. There are some
contemporary theologians and bishops who might attempt to court modern public
with "updated" views, but that's hardly official teaching.

The reason you don't hear much from Orthodox Churches on this topic is that
most would find it absurd to even discuss questions such as these.

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adventured
I'd like to see this done for ghosts, alien visitors, god, supernatural
beings, general mysticism, luck, fate, reincarnation, karma, miracles,
astrology, ESP, deja vu and so on.

The number of people that believe in ghosts is just as shocking to me as
people that don't believe in evolution.

"A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they
believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of
respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll."

[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/why-do-
peo...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/why-do-people-
believe-in-ghosts/379072/)

~~~
MCRed
Ghosts are real and I can explain them completely rationally: The subconscious
is trained to see patterns or anti-patterns that indicate danger. Thus the
subconscious makes you "feel" thinks or see things that, historically in the
evolutionary sense, were there.

Only our environment is generally a lot safer, so you sense these things when
your subconscious senses risk, and alarms you, causing you to "See" the
ghosts.

That's effectively as real as the color yellow, as far as you can individually
sense.

~~~
gnaritas
That would be a hallucination, which no is not real.

~~~
DanBC
Hallucinations are real, they just don't have physical sources.

MCRed seems to be talking about paredolia, which is very different from
hallucination.

~~~
gnaritas
That a hallucination is occurring is real, that which you hallucinate, i.e.
perceive, is not. You aren't seeing a real dragon if you hallucinate a dragon,
and that's what real means in this context.

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nostrademons
Curious what the plot would look like if the U.S. were subdivided into coastal
regions vs. interior:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesusland_map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesusland_map)

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codecamper
Not sure if I believe this chart. For example, fewer people in eastern Europe
believe in evolution than Western Europe? Eastern Europe has very low rates of
religious belief - because of their connection with communism.

~~~
lmm
OTOH believers in Eastern Europe tend to be more fervent, for the same reason.
So it doesn't seem that implausible.

~~~
nzp
Yet OTOH the number of people in Eastern Europe who are fervent and actually
have any clue about Orthodoxy is vanishingly small. Most people hold beliefs
which are some sort of their own private Christianity which only pays lip
service to actual Orthodoxy. The common phrase "I don't need a priest or
Church to communicate with God" or some variant thereof is illustrative of
this.

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maged
How were countries selected? The obvious exceptions (other than the states)
are left out (i.e. Arab gulf states).

~~~
scriptedfate
The countries on the plot are exactly the 34 countries surveyed in the
original paper, "Public Acceptance of Evolution" Jon Miller et al, 2006.

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joosters
There is no explanation about which countries have been included and which
have not. What is the criteria? Was there any at all? Or did the author just
pick some countries to make the USA a more obvious outlier?

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BrandoElFollito
Interesting data, nonsense fit. If you do not have a theory wich predicts a
relationship between data, stop for... sake to "fit a line". There is nothing
to fit.

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morenoh149
Honestly I'd like to see tighter clustering near the trend line before I'd say
it's a trend. Unless the scaling was optimized so the country names could fit
near the dot

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TazeTSchnitzel
Why? Religion. The US is the most religious developed country.

~~~
tomjakubowski
Saudi Arabia?

~~~
Oletros
I think it is not considered a developed country.

And if it is, it reinforces the OP point

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MCRed
Correlations is not Causation, otherwise you could make the argument that
Somali Pirates are the cause of Global Warming.

The data here is poor in several ways- the selection is highly weighted
towards european countries and excludes, for instance, Canada and Mexico and
South America. Africa is right out and the only asian country is Japan.
Further, GDP is not a measure of "Wealth" but the size of an economy (wealth
is like savings, GDP is like gross revenue.)

Finally the worst thing about this is its sole purpose is to reinforce the
anti-intellectual idea that liberals are superior to others... the great
increase in pseudo science among liberals and liberal propaganda is very
troubling, especially when combined with the liberal belief that they have a
monopoly on science.

Yes, it's true that a religious person will say "well, I have faith" when
backed into a corner.

However, it's not the case that liberals insisting that "Science" proves them
correct because they read some propaganda on DailyKOS or TalkingPointsMemo is
a superior position! Quite the contrary. And much worse they think it is
superior, that "Science said it, I believe it, that settles it" and are often
very smug about this.

This means when engaging in an actual debate with them, the will not respond
to science, cannot bring science to bear (they will link to things that claim
to be backed by science but cannot respond to scientific arguments to refute
them)

Liberals have faith in talking points, and that's at best, no better than
someone who has faith in their preacher.

But liberals are far more smug about it, and less likely to allow for areas of
grey.

This is, of course my experience only.

~~~
Osmium
> The data here is poor in several ways- the selection is highly weighted
> towards european countries and excludes, for instance, Canada and Mexico and
> South America. Africa is right out and the only asian country is Japan.
> Further, GDP is not a measure of "Wealth" but the size of an economy (wealth
> is like savings, GDP is like gross revenue.)

Agreed with this. The selection of countries is limited, and is a result of
the source article, which is itself an interesting read on the politicisation
of science:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5788/765.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5788/765.full)

I wrote a longer response to the rest of your comment, but on reflection I
think I'd rather not to get into that here.

~~~
MCRed
You concede the politicization of science, which is my point, so thank you for
that. Even if you have a different ideology, thanks for conceding the point.
That's too challenging for most here.

