Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools:

"Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview.

"Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come."

Fact: a greater proportion of Turks are Creationist than are Americans. Remember that Turkey is a secular and liberal Muslim country; one can project what the attitudes in other Muslim nations might be....

Fact, here are the proportions of American medical doctors by religion (or lack of) who find Intelligible Design plausible:

All - 18%
Jewish - 3%
Protestant - 35%
Catholic - 11%
Orthodox Christian - 37%
Hindu - 11%
Buddhist - 0%
Muslim - 43%
Atheist - 0%
Spiritual - 4%
Other - 29%

A few months ago I was talking to a friend who is pretty highly "connected," insofar as he seems to know everyone. So we were talking about some genetics issues and I asked him, "You know who Lee Silver is, right?" There was a pause, and my friend was like, "I just got off the phone with him."

I know this paper will make some ScienceBloggers very happy, Assortative sociality, limited dispersal, infectious disease and the genesis of the global pattern of religion diversity:

Why are religions far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas? We propose, as an answer, that more religions have emerged and are maintained in the tropics because, through localized coevolutionary races with hosts, infectious diseases select for three anticontagion behaviours: in-group assortative sociality; out-group avoidance; and limited dispersal. These behaviours, in turn, create intergroup boundaries that effectively fractionate, isolate and diversify an original culture leading to the genesis of two or more groups from one. Religion is one aspect of a group's culture that undergoes this process. If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity, reflecting an evolutionary history of antagonistic coevolution between parasites and hosts and subsequent religion genesis. We present evidence that supports this model: for a global sample of traditional societies, societal range size is reduced in areas with more pathogens compared with areas with few pathogens, and in contemporary countries religion diversity is positively related to two measures of parasite stress.

There are more religions in the tropics, but I'm not sure they have the causality right. For example, pathogens could lead to lower IQ, which may lead to more religion (there are 1,000 other correlations one could make like this). But with Toxoplasma gondii as a prior I'm not willing to dismiss the sort of argument as the one made above on first inspection.

H/T Dienekes.

My post from a few weeks ago, Why does race matter for women?, elicited a lot of response (made it to the front page of Digg). Most of the open public discourse on race is bracketed in a few coarse frameworks; it is a social construction, and no one cares who is truly enlightened anymore, white racism keeps people of color down, etc. Though of utility in sloganeering I think most of these generalizations are such half-approximations that they mislead a great deal of time. So for example the interesting repeated finding that women in the United States are consistently more race conscious in partner selection than males in terms of avowed and revealed preferences (the study I posted on was just the most thorough, there were a few other prior surveys that showed the same general surprising finding). Public dialogue and discussion doesn't operate much with the assumption that women are the repository of race consciousness and purity, that seems a rather retrograde view among White People, but something close to it seems to operate in the day to day (as many 25 year old Asian American male virgins might attest to).

With that in mind, Yann points me to a new paper, Prevalence of obesity in multi-racial vs. mono-racial individuals:

Listen to Lee Siegel, Internet Reading: Speeding Us Up by Dumbing Us Down?. He's positively unhinged, totally out of control. I don't really mind Siegel, he obviously going to spend as much of his professional capital as possible attacking the internet after his own negative self-inflicted experiences. Why is the media putting this guy on the phone? A 7 year old farting on air would be more informative and edifying. Siegel's been all over the place basically claiming that the internet heralds the arrival of Gog and Magog. I really wouldn't be too shocked if during the next interview Siegal pulls a young girl next to his phone and as she's screaming he cuts her throat and murmurs to the interviewer that the internet did it, that the internet was responsible for it and that the internet has blood on its hands.