Hehe, you are still very eager to enjoy this special stance … to surround yourself with a circle of people who identify with you and who percieve a high level of the peer group solidarity … only to stun the hapless peers with an admission that your position is very different. Like in this blog, attracting a science-minded, secular, immigration-centric bunch, and then displaying very conservative social attitudes. And the people, like, gasp, it can’t be true, are you a troll?

But on the internet, unlike in realspace, this surprising effect is muted. It may be too easy for the lurkers to tune out of the bothersome message, and to keep listening only to the familiar messages.

Happy Thanxgiving Razib! Here is a bit more of interesting holiday read for you … a bit too commercial but still very interesting IMVHO:
http://blog.goldenhelix.com/?p=1482

if I faced a pressure to express my views on creation before a traditionalist audience, I might have said that the study is underpowered and may not achieve statistical significance (only one Universe, doh) and fraught with severe ascertainment bias (if our Universe didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be observing it now), so my inner statistician withholds judgement

are you serious, or is the smiley face indicating a joke? i’ve loudly admitted to being an atheist at christian fellowship parties i was invited to when people started talking about ‘we’re all christians.’ it wasn’t that much of a disruption, and i didn’t want the people i’d meet to be deceived later. then again, i also have had to tell shocked and confused students from the persian gulf in college that i was an atheist when they presumed i was muslim from my name, and then presumed i must be a ‘bad muslim’ when i stated i wasn’t a muslim.

I’m so glad that you understand this problem now, this dilemma of imposing religious beliefs on children to prevent their (real or imaginable) missteps vs. putting the children at risk of deep psychological trauma, ostracism, depression, and suicide once it turns out that their natural aspirations are incompatible with their beliefs.

If you remember, just 6 months ago, in your blog entry on genetic behavioral risk and possible mechanisms of its societal mitigation, you actually advocated imposing Mormon beliefs on children with genetic predisposition to alcoholism, and dismissed my concerns about the wisdom of such “therapy” and my stats on incidence on suicide and depression in the Mormon country.

It’s great to see that your views have become more nuanced. It’s often said in this respect that “religion is OK between consenting adults but should not be pushed on children” … as any catchphrase, this one may contain an element of exaggeration, but it’s definitely worth a thought.

As to attitudes, polls, and pols, I don’t think we are in disagreement other than over some technical minutae. All I wanted to explain, with due respect to the GSS, is that its percentages are not immutable. It is well known that our answers to very similarly sounding basic questions in polls and interviews and conversations depend on the wording of the question, on the sequential order of the questions, and generally on the settings and peer pressure. The GSS may be a remarkably good snapshot of personally held views, but when asked about creation in public, and in more roundabout ways, people may adopt creationist postures with far greater ease.

LOL if I faced a pressure to express my views on creation before a traditionalist audience, I might have said that the study is underpowered and may not achieve statistical significance (only one Universe, doh) and fraught with severe ascertainment bias (if our Universe didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be observing it now), so my inner statistician withholds judgement

attitudes toward climate change, evolution, cosmology, etc., are qualitatively different from accommodations you might make with someone’s orthopraxy (i don’t drink beer at my parents’ house!). whatever your opinion on those issues, they matter in a substantive way. the public policy implication might be direct (climate change), or, it might be tenuous at best (cosmology), but these are serious issues. i understand why politicians obfuscate and lie, but i think it’s reasonable not to tolerate this crap.

When my employee asked to shift timing of an important meeting because he otherwise couldn’t get back in time from his Friday prayer, I showed understanding and accomodation, instead of expressing my private opinion about these matters. Call it waffling, but basically, the fabric of the society / of the family depends on symbolic respect to certain (perhaps nonsensical) traditions in respective traditional contexts. Affirming creationist myths in what’s essentially a job interview just isn’t such a context.

When it comes to science or scientific matters, they are either pandering to you, or to those you disagree with. The only time they’re not, is when they say “I don’t know”.

Best advise, ignore the politicians, and keep your eye on the bureaucrats – they’re the dangerous ones.

Cheers

that’s interesting, because in other places obama says he believes in evolution more than angels. so clear pandering/waffling.

Here’s then-Sen. Obama, D-Ill., speaking at the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa. on April 13, 2008:

Q: Senator, if one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—“Daddy, did god really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

A: What I’ve said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it . . . it may not be 24-hour days, and that’s what I believe. I know there’s always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don’t, and I think it’s a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I’m a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don’t presume to know.

Here’s the YouTube video for those who actually want to hear him say it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kxDfJU4z2E&feature=youtu.be&t=9m

Cheers

Cheers

Cheers

The LDS Church actually stopped teaching it soon after the hypothesis have been scientifically rejected.

the problem is that lay mormons often don’t keep up on these details, and all sorts of weird ‘seminary myths’ get perpetuated, and most non-mormons learn about mormonism from their mormon friends. not people more familiar with the ‘doctrine,’ whatever that is. to give a more offensive example, some of the more racist stuff about blacks and the mark of cain seems to still be in circulation among mormons, and even among conservative white protestants.

But does GSS has an answer to the real question here, which I see as “does an anti-science position of a national politician matter for the voters?” (Other pundits give it an absolute “yes”)

BTW, more relavantly for the main topic of this blog (the gene stuff), Dreher writes that
Science shows that it’s impossible for American Indians to have been descended from the Hebrews, as the LDS Church teaches.

The LDS Church actually stopped teaching it soon after the hypothesis have been scientifically rejected. The wording about Izraelites being “the principal ancestors” of Native Americans had been redacted out of the preface of the Book of Mormon.

Marco Rubio was not asked, “How old is the Earth?” He was asked, “How old do you think the Earth is?” Surely he has an belief, based either on science of theology, but instead he chose to dance away from the question. I find that dismaying. If we take “Young Earth” creationism at face value, EVERYTHING we know about physics and astronomy and even higher mathematics completely falls apart.

During his campaign Mitt Romney lamented how science education was lagging behind the rest of the Western industrialized world. Considering how 46% percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years, Romney certainly would have had his work cut out for him if he had been elected.

Let’s face it: “Young Earth” creationism is the antithesis of science. It completely inverts the scientific method, starting with an assumption (i.e. “God did it.”), then contorting science to fit that assumption, and if scientific facts do not support the notion that “God did it,” those facts can be dismissed as nothing less than an elaborate Satanic deception. I expect fundamentalist Christian preachers to spew this kind of gobbledygook, but not members of the House Science Committee and CERTAINLY not up-and-coming Presidential prospects.

More specifically, I don’t expect our elected representatives to fully understand the radioactive dating methodologies commonly used to determine the age of rocks and fossil specimens, but I do expect that they acknowledge that such techniques exist and accept the validity of their findings.