Well, it turns out that there isn’t a handy-dandy reference for the numbers for various religions in the past. Mark Kirkorian over at The Corner linked to my earlier post where I expressed skepticism about the contention by the Vatican demographer that a larger number of Muslims than Roman Catholics is new. Other people have contacted me as well. In any case, my hunch is that in fact Muslims were more numerous than Roman Catholics in the period between 950 and 1750, though the window could be shorter. My reasoning below the fold….

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The Islamic Republic of Harvard?:

But the decision put Harvard in the awkward position of having to arbitrate what constitutes legitimate religious practice. Marine claims there was a “moral and ethical responsibility” for the administration to act on this request, telling the Associated Press last month that “it’s a pretty big breach of their moral and religious code … and it’s just not possible for them to be in a mixed environment.” But according to Aljawhary, “It’s not like we can’t work out when men are around.” In fact, “we were not ‘demanding’ women-only hours,” Aljawhary said. If the administration had said no, she said, “it would have been okay.”
Universities are often forced to alter their policies to accommodate the religious views of students–such as changing test dates on religious holidays or accommodating special dietary restrictions. But what happens when students hold a relatively extreme version of religious practice? And perhaps more importantly, what happens when that practice comes into conflict with other values important to the university?

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Dan MacArthur at Genetic Future has the details. Some of the stuff coming out of genomics reminds me a lot of what you see with social science; lots of sexy studies which turn out not to be as significant upon later analysis. Perhaps hypotheses are overrated?

Update: Follow up post with some numbers and logic laid out.
Muslims more numerous than Catholics: Vatican:

Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
“For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us,” Formenti told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.

I’m willing to bet that Formenti is wrong. What do others think? Consider that Catholicism was the dominant religion in 1250 across 2/3 of Europe, and the residual Christian population in the Islamic world did not tend to be in communion with Rome (Maronites being the exception to the rule). I suspect that there were more Muslims than Roman Catholics until about the 18th century, when Islamicization of marginal peoples such as the Central Asian Turks was just about tapped out and population growth in the New World was adding to the numbers of Catholics. Population growth in Catholic European nations in the 19th and early 20th centuries would likely have increased the lead
I’ll try and look up some population numbers and post them. I know this is a pedantic point, but when it comes to controversial topics which have public policy implications people should try really hard not to make stuff up when there’s no need….

At my other weblog a long post on religion:

On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom’s line of thinking is actually most powerfully argued in Scott Atran’s In God’s We Trust. The cognitive psychologists and anthropologists who work within this paradigm are operate under some background assumptions in regards to our mental architecture. First, human cognitive states are strongly biased by innate tendencies which have a biological origin. Perception and language acquisition are easily explained by nativist treatments, but Atran and others have argued that more obscure biases such as folk biology also exist, while other domains such as theory of mind are broadly accepted within the scholarly community.

I have a review copy of Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence; but I’m not planning on reading it at this point. See John Hawks for why. Sometimes interdisciplinary work sheds new light on old questions because of the ability to think-outside-of-the-box. Sometimes not so much.

Just an FYI, but Kat photos will be delayed by a day or so this week. But if you are interested in katage, check out this week’s South Park.

Greg Laden has Gene Genie #24 up. I’ll be hosting #30 at the end of April….

Michael C. Moynihan has a article up at Reason, In Defense of Geert Wilders:

In response to the controversy surrounding Fitna, Wilders’ website was knocked offline by his American host, Network Solutions; he has been repeatedly denounced by the government of Jan Peter Balkenende as a liability to Dutch “interests”; the country’s shriveled monarch, Queen Beatrix, admonished that free speech doesn’t allow one the right to offend; and last week 1000 “anti-racism” activists protested Fitna in Amsterdam’s city center. As one demonstrator told Reuters, “There should be restrictions on what Wilders can say… it is a very bad example to people to let him say whatever he wants.” Similar demonstrations on behalf of free speech and the freedom to mock, insult, and defame religion have yet to materialize.

Ah, too bad here in the United States we aren’t as progressive and liberal as those Europeans. They’re so advanced compared to us. As a racist I luckily enjoy the right to insult Islam on this side of the pond.

Another paper is out which falls under the category of using genetics to understand human history; Analysis of Genomic Admixture in Uyghur and Its Implication in Mapping Strategy:

The Uyghur (UIG) population, settled in Xinjiang, China, is a population presenting a typical admixture of Eastern and Western anthropometric traits. We dissected its genomic structure at population level, individual level, and chromosome level by using 20,177 SNPs spanning nearly the entire chromosome 21. Our results showed that UIG was formed by two-way admixture, with 60% European ancestry and 40% East Asian ancestry…Both the magnitude of LD and fragmentary ancestral chromosome segments indicated a long history of Uyghur. Under the assumption of a hybrid isolation (HI) model, we estimated that the admixture event of UIG occurred about 126 [107∼146] generations ago, or 2520 [2140∼2920] years ago assuming 20 years per generation. In spite of the long history and short LD of Uyghur compared with recent admixture populations such as the African-American population, we suggest that mapping by admixture LD (MALD) is still applicable in the Uyghur population but ∼10-fold AIMs are necessary for a whole-genome scan.

The rationale for these sorts of admixture studies is medical; you need to know the genetic background of a population to make sure that you don’t infer spurious assocations due to population substructure. Imagine that you have a study group and allele B on gene 1 is strongly associated with a higher incidence of disease X. This is important information which is going to be relevant for targeting and treatment. But what if you find out later that your study group consisted of two historically distinct populations, and allele B is only found in one of these. Additionally, within this population allele B is not associated with disease X. One can infer then that the original finding was simply due to the population substructure, and the correlation between allele B and disease X was due to the higher frequency of both these characters within a population as opposed to any causal relationship. Sometimes the substructure is going to be cryptic, and in other cases researchers need to be clear about the level of granularity necessary for any particular question.

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Do minorities feel they have more in common with each other rather than whites? See Inductivist.

It was in the 7th century of the Christian Era many of the events which shaped the course of Islamic sectarianism occurred. The major one you are aware of is the Shia-Sunni split; the reality of the origins of this schism and the way in which in manifests today is more complex than the cartoon cut-out you are normally presented, but I want to focus on a group which is outside of the Shia-Sunni dichotomy, the Ibadi. The Ibadi are descended from one of the assorted Kharijite sects. The Kharijites were extremists in the early history of Islam, they rejected Ali because he offered to parlay with the opposition. Though analogies are fraught with misrepresentations, the Kharijites are somewhat like the radical Protestants of the early Reformation era; they rejected the the vast majority of Muslims as infidels and refused to compromise with the world. Here is the Wikipedia characterization of Kharijites:

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Guess what Kate Beckinsale prefers over sushi….

New PLOS paper, Geographic Patterns of Genome Admixture in Latin American Mestizos. Nothing new, but pushing the ball forward….

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