Belief in Evolution versus National Wealth | Hacker News Reader

Belief in Evolution versus National Wealth

calamitiesofnature.com

27 pointsColinWright42 comments

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.

Yep, that, and the regression seems to be forced through the origin, which is stupid. And the dependent variable is on the X-axis. All pretty weird choices.

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.

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.

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/

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

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...

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.

Eastern block countries after half the century of communism are mostly atheistic, even if they appear religious on the outside. I think that some pretty low scores (less than 50%) may be due to poor education - some people simply couldn't comprehend question, for it being too abstract.

Pretty much. Here in Serbia, the official number is IIRC > 90 % Orthodox Christian, but out of that number, hardly anyone actually believes in god in all seriousness and in line with the Church doctrine. Also hardly anyone goes to church on a regular basis, in fact I'd say that the idea of weekly church attendance is something that most people picked up from American pop culture. There even are fairly respected local priests who squarely say to people there is no god, and then proceed to woo women, eat meat on fasting days (there's even a "spell" with which they bless the non-fish meat to turn it into fish) and so on. It's pretty hilarious really. :)

The last and only minister of education that proposed creationism be taught in schools was laughed out of office.

Thanks TIL.

>(there's even a "spell" with which they bless the non-fish meat to turn it into fish)

What is the name of this spell/ritual? It's so hilarious that i'd like to learn more.

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...

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.

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

Semantics. But then, this is hacker news, intelligent discussion gets downvoted or hellbanned.

You can't claim semantics as an escape hatch in a discussion hinging on the meaning of a word. And if one can't object to the use of word like "real" in this context, then it wasn't an intelligent discussion to being with. In intelligent discussions people are more careful with words and always open to being more precise.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Eastern Europe seems pretty religious, according to this map: http://i.imgur.com/1mQ7njH.jpg

Several Eastern European countries have very strong orthodox churches. There is a large, general area there referred to as Europe's bible belt for that reason.

For example, Romania is an extremely religious country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Romania

Actually, Poland is very religious.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

Saudi Arabia?

I think it is not considered a developed country.

And if it is, it reinforces the OP point

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.

This has nothing to do with liberals and conservatives.

Evolution is a wedge issue. The whole point of this is to reinforce leftist smug sense of superiority. This is shown by the choice of countries-- largely socialist europe, the choice of yardsticks (GDP which is a false indicator of wealth) and the choice of calling it "national wealth" which is a generally socialist phrase. (An individualist or capitalist would say "personal wealth" or "individual net worth"... socialists think in terms of abstract entities like "nations" being worth serving and having value, including "wealth"... because they think the property of every member of the nation is the property of the nation... which is interesting because it's pretty much admitting they think everyone is or should be a slave, though they would never come out and say that.)

Proof: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103447

PS-- I know you cannot make any statements that go against Liberalism, Global Warming or Google on hacker news without being downvoted. I accept that. But every time I make a cogent argument and get downvoted, I hope those down voting me are smart enough, somewhere, to realize the damage they are doing to their own integrity and honor. That actually has a better chance of opening minds and eyes than my arguments, unfortunately. So, yes, smear the queer, I don't mind, I admit, I'm the queer!

What a bunch of whining you do. If you're downvoted us not because am hypothetical HN conspiracy, is because you write a lot of stupidity against what you hate.

Nope. I've been on hacker news since 2007. It's never been a tolerant community of people who have different viewpoints, no matter how well articulated.

I've been harassed, doxxed, and was even once hellbanned for linking to a scientific article.

But keep on believing it- the delusion that you're being rational is a key component of getting you to embrace your ideology.

Just keep thinking all those who point out errors are religious idiots, or irrational or "stupid".

Hell, you couldn't even provide a counter argument to me-- you just called me stupid.

Think about that.

You can't make an argument.

You call me a name.

And still you think you're the more rational one?

Amazing!

Enjoy your filter bubble.

I upvoted all of his comments. He is right, it's impossible to post stuff on HN that goes against most users worldview.

> 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

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.

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.

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