Sex ratios of atheists, agnostics, and believers

Reading one of John Derbyshire's posts spotlighting the pathetic spectacle of some shrew bemoaning the lack of female representation among those in the "secularist movement" at Secular Right got me wondering about the gender breakdown by supernatural belief. Personal experience strongly suggests that most atheists are men, but to what degree does their dominance extend?The...

Idiocracy is an old friend

Jayman has an interesting post showing that the positive correlation between fertility and political conservatism has existed in the US for nearly a century. Rifting off of this (okay, okay, copying it!), presented below are similar graphs tracing the relationship between fertility* and a couple of other angles I'm interested in--intelligence and educational attainment....

It gets better, er, more propitious, over time?

After reproducing a list of obscure vocabulary words, Steve Sailer wonders:Do vocabularies continue to grow over a lifetime of reading? The 10 word vocab test on the GSS could of course be used for this, but most of my growth has evidently been at the high end of the range, which probably wouldn't show up on the GSS.No one attempted to formulate a response in the post's comments,...

One million beating hearts

Thanks for the stimulus and the engageme...

Charles Murray on (the) Pew (quiz)

Criticizing a joint effort by PBS and Pew Research to construct a 12-item party identification quiz, Charles Murray makes a few questionable assertions. Firstly, his commentary on the "I never doubt the existence of God" item:So let’s say you’re the Pew researcher making up the test, you know that conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals, and you want an item that will capture that tendency. So far so good. But then do you say to yourself,...

Calorie burning corpulence

Reading Razib in my hotel room in God's country over the long weekend moved me to check out the fitness room. Here she is:Editorializing a bit, it's repetitive, low intensity equipment, exclusively. And it's typical. This stuff burns muscle and causes the body to store fat in the kangaroo pouch. Diet is the primary cause of the obesity 'epidemic', but this non-dietary...