16% of US Biology teachers believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.
The full survey is available here, and goes on to say that:
Among the biology teachers, 16% believed that human beings were created by God in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years (and an additional 9% declined to answer). Although this is a far smaller proportion than found among the general public (48%), our data demonstrate substantial sympathy for the "young earth" creationist position among nearly one in six members of the science teaching profession. The teachers who chose the "young earth" creationist position devoted 35% fewer class hours to evolution than all other teachers.
Why Santa Claus is not a God
Justin Barrett in the Journal of Cognition and Culture (paywall only, sorry folks):
Through the lenses of cognitive science of religion, successful god concepts must possess a number of features. God concepts must be (1) counterintuitive, (2) an intentional agent, (3) possessing strategic information, (4) able to act in the human world in detectable ways and (5) capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. That Santa Claus appears to be only inconsistently represented as having all five requisite features Santa has failed to develop a community of true believers and cult. Nevertheless, Santa concepts approximate a successful god concept more closely than other widespread cultural characters such as Mickey Mouse and the Tooth Fairy, in part explaining Santa's relative cultural prominence.
A Cognitive Typology of Religious Actions
Justin Barrett and Brian Malley have a rather intriguing paper out in the Journal of Cognition and Culture: A Cognitive Typology of Religious Actions (doi:10.1163/156853707X208486):
The rapid but disproportionate growth of the cognitive science of religion in some areas, coupled with the desire to meaningfully connect with more traditional, function-inspired classifications, has left the field with an incomplete and sometimes inconsistent typology of religious and related actions. We address this shortcoming by proposing a systematic typology of counterintuitive actions based on their cognitive representational structures.
This typology may serve as the framework of a research program that seeks to establish (1) psychologically, whether each class of events receives different cognitive treatment within a given context and similar representation across contexts; and (2) anthropologically, whether the different classes are characterized by different performance frequencies, social functions, and kinds of interpretations, making them useful explanatory and predictive distinctions.
Scalzi vs. The Creationism Museum
In short: John Scalzi takes a day trip to the Creationism Museum, and mercilessly mocks the stupidity therein. The photos he took are amazing, and includes what may just possibly be the coolest photo ever:
Round-up: speech sounds, Pama-Nyungan, Baby Einstein, Bird-song and Biblical archaeology
Ok. Time for a catch up post. There's just not enough hours in the day...
1: Native Language Governs The Way Toddlers Interpret Speech Sounds:
Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning
2: Claire Bowern's started a new project for Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory which aims "to determine the structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which will shed light on prehistoric population movements". It'll be exciting to see how this works out. Also take a look at the blog: Pama-Nyungan reconstruction, which is fronted with a lovely picture of a neighbor-net.
3: Oh the irony: Disney's Baby Einstein videos that promise to enhance your babies brain power, don't work. In fact, the babies who watched Baby Einstein videos had worse performance on language assessments. It's almost as if it's pseudo-science or something. More details are here...
4: Mark Liberman on Language Log has an interesting article on Fox P2 and bird song grammar:
...But to reify human speech and language abilities as a "parser" located in the caudate nucleus, regulated by FoxP2 and shared with finches -- well, speculation is fun, but this is like the kind of too-specific science fiction that's out of date by the time it's published, and seems merely quaint within a few years.
5: Eric Cline in the Boston Globe says "Biblical archeology is too important to leave to crackpots and ideologues. It's time to fight back":
NOAH'S ARK. The Ark of the Covenant. The Garden of Eden. Sodom and Gomorrah. The Exodus. The Lost Tomb of Jesus. All have been "found" in the last 10 years, including one within the past six months. The discoverers: a former SWAT team member; an investigator of ghosts, telepathy, and parapsychology; a filmmaker who calls himself "The Naked Archeologist"; and others, none of whom has any professional training in archeology.
Jonathan Haidt on moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion
Jonathan Haidt at talks about moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion at Edge:
In what follows I will take it for granted that religion is a part of the natural world that is appropriately studied by the the methods of science. Whether or not God exists (...), religiosity is an enormously important fact about our species.There must be some combination of evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories that can explain why human religious practices take the various forms that they do, many of which are so similar across cultures and eras.
It's an excellent article that takes a cutting edge approach to the psychology of religion. Go check it out.
John Frum meets Prince Philip
Finally! a real competitor to John Frum - Prince Philip:
Legend had it that there was a clutch of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu which - as bizarre as it may seem - worshipped Prince Philip as a god.
How and why they had chosen the Duke of Edinburgh, I had no idea. I fully expected the story to be either false, or wildly exaggerated.
(thanks Rob!)