Apologies if this has been posted before and I missed it: http://reason.com/blog/2010/02/24/wh...d-atheists-are

One of the findings of the study is that "Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence."

A couple of years ago Helmuth Nyborg found similar results among adults.

Discuss...

6 points, does that strike you as significant? Seems to be pretty similar, if we give any validity to IQ tests anyway.

I'd rather talk about what I'd consider fresher and more interesting - men who prefer sexual exclusivity tend to be more intelligent, apparently.

We can't puzzle out causation in such a crude way, sadly.

Really though, a significant number of "great geniuses" have been philanderers. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part, but Russell, Einstein, Feynman...

I imagine polygyny < monogamy < promiscuity, at least based on the "evolutionary novelty" approach used here.

This and This


According to 2 of the 3 IQ tests I have taken...I'm a friggin genius.

And I think we can all agree.....well.... you know.

You realize it's not a real IQ test if it's online, right?

Right, correlelation does not imply causation.

It's interesting to speculate on the cause, though. Nyborg postulated in his research that belief in god was more likely among lower intelligence people simply because they were more likely to accept an answer and less likely to be skeptical than people with higher intelligence. I suspect he's exactly right.

PZ Myers says we shouldn't make a big deal out of this.

EDIT: wow...beat out by 5 minutes....

Only one was online, the other was in an issue of Mad Magazine.

You both lie.



Anything on the interweb is accurate. Don't be a hater... be a participater...WHAT? Shhhhheeeeee yo!


Oh...and tell the truth.... did you used to stare at the last fold in page and try and figure it out or did you just fold it in to get the answer?

You hafta try and figure it out first! LDO

Multiply the small difference of 6 IQ over however many millions of people and you get a very large difference.

What I mean is is it statistically significant within the confines of a study? PZ raises the same point. Should we really consider these results to mean anything?

Nice to see the atheist community isn't running with this.

I wonder what the reaction would be if the results were reversed.

And don't get all uppity about that quandary you theists, I'm not implying anything. Just seriously curious.

There would about the same percentage that would go "HA ! Look at that!"


And then the same percentage that would go "Dude.... sit down and shut up. I'm embarrassed that you're on my team."

Every team has ******s on it.

I see what you did there.


Hey Tex.... don't read any further:












Anyone else just notice any irony in this thread?

Yes, they are statisically significant. Nobody wants to do any work around here. Click the link in the OP and read two sentences.

The study was done by the London School of Economics. The first sentence quoted is

""More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds....""

further down

""Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence....""

So yeah, it's statistically significant and published by a very reputable institution that wouldn't fudge up their numbers. It doesn't mean 'atheists win!', but giant LOL at nobody in the thread bothering to click the link and read for 10 seconds.

I read the article. What I meant was, is 6 points close enough that it might be in the margin of error to make the two numbers statistically the same? I'm not great with stats, but PZ seems to make the same point.

I'm just trying to figure out whether this study is showing a real difference or whether the IQs of the people in the study where close enough that they should be considered basically the same (ie: within the margin of error).

Do you know what 'statistically significant' means? Because you are basically asking exactly that, and the question was already answered.

Or maybe are you asking if there's a noticeable difference between two people with IQs separated by 6? Or if there's a noticeable difference between two populations that have average IQs 6 apart? They are definitely* different, but does this difference make a difference?

*not definitely, but we're more than 95% or 99% or whatever sure

Cmon. This is a clear case of correlation rather than causation.

Meanwhile what percentage of men would prefer exclusivity if they had the options of Tiger Woods and the permission of their wife or girlfriend?

If it's statistically significant, it means it is outside the margin of error. It doesnt mean there's no chance of it being due to experimental error, but the chances are slim.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/m...nimore_co.html

Here's Dr. Kanazawa's personal webpage:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/

and his professional webpage at LSE:

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExp...zawa@lse.ac.uk

and wikipedia (of course):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa

I'm still trying to figure out who the author really is. I cannot find his educational background anywhere. He is cited as an evolutionary psychologist, but I can't find any evidence of formal training in that field. I believe it's highly unlikely that he has any training in that area because he's listed in the Managerial Economics and Strategy Group in the Department of Management (as a "Reader" -- and I'm not really sure what that position actually is).

I'm open to being wrong if anyone can find evidence of formal training in evolutionary psychology.

----

Also, regarding the author:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/566.html

[Note: Numerous links omitted from the text, especially the series of five links associated to the phrase "inability to do data analysis"]

As best as I can tell, he's not a particularly respected author in the world of psychology. Here's an interesting commentary published in Psychological Review:

http://users.fmg.uva.nl/dborsboom/BorsboomDolan2006.pdf

Dr. Kanazawa could be a solid example of peer-review journals going very wrong.