A reader sends along this bulletin….

in which some science writer at CNN plumps firmly to be counted among those who worship the intellect as distinct from those who use it. Turns out the origin and essense of religion is paranoia. Who knew?

Well, I suppose you *all* knew–and you weren’t tell me because you are all plotting against me!

The invaluable Mike Flynn, whose novels you really should be reading, responds out of his training a statistician (which involves actually using the intellect and not merely worshipping it):

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say.

Especially since the difference is less than the 15 point difference between white and black IQ testing. One of the things we learn in statistics is the difference between “statistically significant” and “practically significant.”

1. Given a large enough population, you will always find “statistically significant” differences between any two subgroups within it.

2. “Statistically significant” means only that there is a small probability of obtaining such a result by chance alone if there were no such difference in fact. But this also means that if you take enough such samples you will find such a difference sooner or later. For example, suppose you take a very large data base with, say, sixty different paired outcomes: liberal/conservative, atheist/believer, sexually exclusive/non-exclusive, vegetarian/non-vegetarian, etc. Then, at a significance level of α = 0.05 (5%) there would be a 5% risk that if there were no real difference between the two outcomes in the pair, your analysis would appear to say that there was. If this 5% risk were applied to all sixty comparisons, we would expect to find three of them to be significant for no particular reason beyond chance. (That some studies have shown an “intelligence” difference for vegetarians and other studies have not is a good indicator that chance is involved.)

3. There is a subset of the intelligent that is devoted to what Mary Midgley calls The Cult of the Cerebral. Among these folks, atheism is a cultural marker. So, unless you adopt these poses, you don’t get to sit at the Cool Kids lunch table. There is a causal connection, but it is peer pressure, not intelligence.

4. There is always more than one factor that differs between the two test groups. If I am comparing production line A, which uses fresh hydroxide, and production line B, which uses recycled hydroxide, and I find a difference in production quality of the output, I cannot automatically assume that it is due to whether I use fresh hydroxide or not. There may be a great many other differences between the two production lines, such as different personnel, different equipment, settings, flow rates, etc.

Social sciences using statistics. It’s how they pose as real scientists. (See? We use math, too!!) But they do not drink deeply enough from the Pierian Spring.

And when they speculate on the Darwinian significance, it’s Nellie bar the door! You can make up an adaptationist story for just about any social trait. It would not be too difficult to produce a Darwinian just-so story about the advantage of religion or the advantage of atheism.