razib
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05:06:02 pm on May 25, 2008 | # | |
most people who know me that i am generally skeptical of any particular religious “essence.” e.g., i doubt most people could infer the nature of a given religion simply by its scripture. that being said, the creationist slant of muslims seems to be noticeable, and dovetails with perceptions of ‘literalism.’ here’s some data, turkey is more creationist than the USA, but arguably one of the less anti-modernist of muslim nations. and a survey of american medical doctors by religion, here the proportion who believe that “God created humans exactly as they appear now”:
all - 18%
jewish - 3%
protestant - 35%
catholic - 11%
orthodox christian - 37%
hindu - 11%
buddhist - 0%
muslim - 43%
atheist - 0%
spiritual - 4%
other - 29%small N’s for some, so be careful about comparing on a fine grained level…but for me the comparison between hindus & muslims is the most interesting. i assume that most of the muslims are south asian immigrants, as are most of the hindu, so you’re eliminating a lot of confounding noise here….
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Willow 7:25 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
I find this conversation more and more grey…if you believe in gene-mutation evolution theory, you must believe that there was, at one point, a first human. Whether you call him Adam or Homo Sapien Sapien Prime seems to me to make very little difference. The argument is about what the first human means, not what the first human is.
Of course, legions of the unimaginative are doubtlessly eager to prove me wrong.
razib 8:08 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
right, but if you read the other questions it removes the ambiguity or imprecision of the reponse. e.g., “What are your views on Evolution?”
for rejection,
hindus - 6%
muslims - 40%
again, you could ask what “reject” exactly entails, but i think the other questions makes it clear that there’s a theistic evolution option. IOW, no grey here, we’re measuring a large reservoir of Creationists among well educated muslims, just as there are many Creationists among well educated protestants (though not much among catholics, jews and hindus). as someone who grew up in a milieu of profession muslim science graduate students i can unfortunately attest to the plausibility of a 40% figure for out & out Creationism among the immigrant community.
aziz 10:16 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
I dont see a necessary contradiction in doctors believing in creationism and rejecting evolution, to be honest. Most physicians deal with genetics in an abstract sense is at all, and even when they do get their hands dirty it’s more about risk factors and tests than any actual evolutionary theory. Evolution is just one aspect of genetics and, arguably, not even remotely the most important one (unless you zoom out and take a Big Picture view, which is fine, but also is even more removed from the daily interaction from a physician’s perspective).
without knowing the sample sizes it is hard to say whether the differences between religious goups are significant. I’m inclined to really only trust the “all” number.
razib 10:42 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
“without knowing the sample sizes it is hard to say whether the differences between religious goups are significant. I’m inclined to really only trust the “all” number.”
you know the sample sizes. click the link. i believe that the *difference* between the response rates is big enough to assert significance (sample size isn’t the only thing that matters when comparing two treatments, right? how different the outcomes are matters too).
the stuff about doctors not needing to know evolution is totally irrelevant to my point. if i found out that many doctors rejected newtonian mechanics i’d be a little weirded out; but i assume that wouldn’t impact their diagnosis process much. i’m way more worried about the fact that doctors are bayesian retards than whether they believe in evolution or not. creationism though generally bespeaks either cultural stupidity or personal stupidity in terms of re-jiggering your priors.
(i will pass on arguing with you the relevance of evolution to genetics
i would assert though that evolution is far more important to solving molecular genetic questions than it was 50 years ago as the lowest proximate fruit has been picked)
aziz 11:08 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
i was lazy, I admit it. I just clicked the link and I see that th emuslim sample was N = 40, hindu N = 63. Compared to the Jewish and various Christian sample sizes, the results are pretty meaningless. I am not sure what you mean by “difference” between response rates, though. As far as significance, we have sample size and the outcomes of the questions. What yo want to do is see if a correlation exists between the question of religion and the questions about beliefs. If the samples are too small, or uneven, or both, then the outcomes themselves are the thing you cant trust. I actually would compute the p-values as a demo rightnow but i really need some sleep. maybe ill fire up matlab tomorrow.
razib 11:31 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
you have another data point point: the high level of creationism in europe (far higher than the rate for the doctors, but that makes sense, a much less elite population sample).
razib 11:40 pm on May 25, 2008 | #
fyi, i popped the proportions into a few tests. p-value for “reject evolution” for muslim vs. hindu is on other side of 0.05 depending on which test.
thabet 12:13 am on May 26, 2008 | #
One common objection to evolution by Muslim science and medical graduates I have come across time and again is: “what practical purpose does it have, anyway?”
as someone who grew up in a milieu of profession muslim science graduate students i can unfortunately attest to the plausibility of a 40% figure for out & out Creationism among the immigrant community.
So can I, and not just amongst (1st gen) immigrants, but 2nd and 3rd gen graduates in a technical or science subject.
IIRC, a philosopher of science (Midgely perhaps) noted that most supporters creationism who provide the intellectual foundations tend to be science graduates. Don’t know the data for this.
razib 12:27 am on May 26, 2008 | #
One common objection to evolution by Muslim science and medical graduates I have come across time and again is: “what practical purpose does it have, anyway?”
pharmacogenomics. my doctor has my ethnic identity (eastern south asia) when getting referrals for prescription; i guess you could say something about how god created peoples differently, but you still need taxonomical information when you lack granularity. this matters on the margins, at least to me, since all marginal health is valuable
of course, like i said, i much prefers doctors are educated on bayesian probability before they hit evolutionary medicine, which is after all just a subset of bayesian probability (evolutionary data just being priors into their probability calculations).
IIRC, a philosopher of science (Midgely perhaps) noted that most supporters creationism who provide the intellectual foundations tend to be science graduates. Don’t know the data for this.
yes. more so among old line creationists than new school intelligent design proponents; the latter are more frequently coming out of philosophy and meta-disciplines. for old line creationists science degrees are simply there to offer an imprimatur of authority toward their beliefs. there is generally a large excess (above random expectation) of people from applied fields such as engineering and medicine as opposed to the pure sciences.
p.s. re: the funny thing about practicality, i once talked to anatomy professor who told me that the first day he had all his students look at male and female cadavers to check for number of ribs. his christian fundy students would often get really agitated and surprised when it came to listing the number of human ribs.