Saturday, November 7, 2015

The Latest Scientific Fraud You're Reading About In The News And On The Web

Taking a break from the topic of the foundation in Darwin's natural selection for eugenics, in both its English and German forms, someone has hurled the newest made-for-media-attention slam at religion, especially Christianity and Islam in the form of a piece of social science as evolutionary biology.  It's a good example of how the Evolutionary Psychology, from here on in to be denoted "evo-psy" for ease of tying and, I hope to indicate what I think of it, and how it, among other things, replaces the construction of a story about the entirely unrecorded past for any actual evidence of what happened in the past which led to who had children and who didn't have children, thus passing on genes, etc.  But, for this post, I'll concentrate on the how of the fraudulent study instead of the alleged framing of the results as biology.

Here is the study, The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World

The study claims

Decety and colleagues assessed altruism and moral cognition in six countries.  Parents in religious households reported that their children expressed more empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life.  However, religiousness was inversely predictive of children's altruism and positively correlated with their punitive tendencies. 

Wow, "across six countries" as I heard it reported, this morning,  that sounds like a massive study.  It makes you wonder how many of the people in the media and the twits on twitter who are talking about this read any farther than this "In Brief" description  It says everything that a social scientist could want to be the take-away message which, these days, is guaranteed to get your study media exposure.

What six countries?  Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, USA and South Africa.   Well, for a start, there is no representation of Latin America or Europe, two rather significant populations with a range of different religious cultures in them.  And, yet, this study is supposed to represent entire worlds of religion.  I would wonder how representative their samples of  religious and non-religious populations in just one of those countries can be believed to be representative of those two populations in any one of those countries, the United States, for example.

Well, all of the children from the United States in their sample came from Chicago, hardly a place which is typical and which, as any large city will, has its own particular cultural quirks.  And, I will point out, hardly likely to be similar to a sample of children taken from a rural population or, perhaps, a suburban one. And which children in Chicago?  Those who go to a prep-school?  A parochial school?  A public school?  A public school in a poor neighborhood or in an affluent neighborhood?  The recruitment was done in school settings, somehow, from what follows, I don't think the children in Chicago were recruited from a range of schools.

That becomes an interesting problem for taking this study at all seriously when you look farther into their methodology, which is typical of these kinds of experimental studies.

The number of children studied in all is 1, 170, to continue with the U.S. portion of that number, I can't, from my quick, sleep-deprived glance at this study find what percentage of those where American children who live in Chicago.  But if, say, it is one sixth of that number, that would be 195 children from the Chicago area who represent the hundreds of millions of Christians in the United States, most of whom were raised in Christian homes.  Only, no, that isn't right either because, presumably, some of those 195 children must have been, or, ideally, should have been Muslims because there are Muslims mentioned in the Study, as well as members of other religions and those brought up in non-religious households. The study says that its universal sample were 23,9% Christian, or a sample of 280 children to represent all of the Christians in the world as characterized by their results.   If you take a sixth of that, you find that about 46 and two-thirds of children in the Chicago area might be purported to yield significant results telling you something about the character of well over two hundred million Americans who are Christians, in vastly different denominations.

And that number of 1,170 children isn't what the results were based in because they threw out the numbers for religious groups which were too small to yield what they purport are significant results.   Oh, and just so you can guess the nature of the science of this study, while they base their characterization of the billions of Christians of the world on 280 children, they define the more than a billion and a half Muslims on a population of 510 and of "not religious" on  323 children.  While noting that the sample sizes are skewed to not reflect the percentages of Muslims and "not religious" populations in the world, the size of those samples are inadequate, as well.

I don't think a reputable statistician would hold those are valid sample sizes.  In her extremely valuable book for non-statisticians, Seeing Through Statistics, Jessica Utts in discussing the issue of sample size in judging the validity of the results says,

The more divers, or variable, the individuals are within each group, the larger the sample needs to be to detect a real difference between the groups.  

Given that logical and sensible rule, the stupendous inadequacy of a sample of 280 children to represent the set of all Christians in the world is easily seen from this:

As defined here, world Christianity consists of 6 major ecclesiastico-cultural blocs, divided into 300 major ecclesiastical traditions, composed of over 33,000 distinct denominations in 238 countries, these denominations themselves being composed of over 3,400,000 worship centers, churches or congregations.

World Christian Encyclopedia by Barrett, Kurian, Johnson, Oxford Univ Press, 2nd edition, 2001

Clearly the world wide numbers of billions of children brought up in Christian homes can't be characterized by 280 children sampled in Chicago, Toronto Canada, Amman Jordan, Izmir and Istanbul Turkey, Capetown South Africa and Guangzhou China, which is purported to yield a characterization of billions of Christians around the world.

And note, those are cities, the "in six countries" claimed in the study is a fraudulent claim, it is actually in seven municipalities, in which of any, the samples are so tiny that they couldn't possibly indicate anything typical of those cities,  the hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions and on to billions of people in any of the purported parts of the world population they pretend to define.  

On that basis alone, this study is a scientific fraud.

And that's only the problem of their clearly and absurdly inadequate sample.  Their methodology to discern differences in "altruism" and "punative" characteristics in the huge range of real world childrens' lives is ludicrous.   And there are more problems with their sampling

The children who were "recruited" (aka, volunteers, to some extent, not a randomly chosen sample)  from schools (in some of those countries school attendance is related to income and in other cities, such as Chicago, given schools don't have a reliable distribution of incomes to be representative).

The ages of those children studied ranged from 5 to 12.  OK, there's a red light right there for anyone with real life experience of real children.  There is no way to guess how even one child would react to their study, based on a lame "Dictator Game" at age 5 and at age 12, there is no way to guess if a kid who is as generous as anything at age 5 won't turn into a totally self-absorbed, selfish brat under the influence of puberty, which may well be just taking over at 12.  Not to mention any single child at any of the other ages.  A 12-year-old can display entirely different behaviors one day to the next.

And that's in real life.  Their study was based on a totally artificial "Dictator Game" the point of which, I don't get and I doubt any of the children in the study got.   Here is the entire description of it in their study.

Dictator Game 
In this task, children were shown a set of 30 stickers and were told to choose their ten favorite.   They were then told “these stickers are yours  to keep.”  Children were instructed that the experimenter did not have the time to play this game with all of the children in their school, so not everyone would be able to receive stickers.

Huh?  Where's the game?  I defy anyone to tell me what the point of it is for an adult imposing it on these kids, never mind what it's supposed to mean to the kids being studied.   And, really, STICKERS?  Those are supposed to be of some great value to children ages 5-12, from totally different backgrounds and cultures?   I would bet that you would find the full range of interest in stickers in a class room of any one of those ages but I can guarantee you that by the time those kids are 12 a lot of the kids would consider STICKERS baby stuff and expressing an interest in them would get you mocked by some of the kids.

I could go on all day pointing out why this study is a complete piece of crap as so many social science and, these days, neuro-sci studies are, based in ridiculously tiny samples which are in no way randomly chosen or representative of the population they are supposed to represent.   And this study is so bad that I will accuse its authors and Cell: Current Biology, where it is published to have had an ideological motive in its publication, which was guaranteed to get into the news as another slam at religion.

28 comments:

  1. What's the point of the game? That some kids don't get stickers? Even by age 5 children are starting to understand that not everybody gets everything there is in the world to be possessed. So the question is, will the kid give stickers to somebody else? What if no child of the subject' acquaintance wants a sticker? I can see giving stickers to one's friends, or not, might be of interest. But are the children assessed on whether or not they become distributors of stickers to the "sticker-poor"?

    Or just on whether or not they accept the unfairness that they get stickers when others don't? I mean, I get the idea of a paltry sample standing for the whole (polls have the same problem, and like polls, how to you affirm the correctness of this study's conclusion?). But where's the control that limits the results in this study to one verifiable conclusion? Where's the empiricism?

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    1. The sample size of Christians, 280, doesn't even achieve the number of "major ecclesiastical traditions" yet the authors of the study purport that that sample size is adequate to make assertions about the character of Christian as opposed to "not religious" children.

      This study is such a total fraud that its publication should be a scandal, but it won't be because the common agreed to lie is that you can get away with lying about that because soc-sci is hard. It is clearly a scientific fraud which scientists give a pass to.

      I think we're in a period of decadent science and a lot of it, like this study, are given a pass because it promotes atheism, the way it's being used in the media where anything that slams religion, especially Christianity, is promoted no matter what a transparent fraud it is.

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  2. There's a similar "bad" poll reviewed at RD. It's a Pew Poll about science v. religion. The article is a good, if superficial, review of the poll and it's problems. The comments indicate why the internet is populated with people who not only don't understand such problems, but who rail against those who point them out.

    Prejudices and preferences are deep and strong, and tribalism reigns supreme. Anything that is not of the preconceived or previously accepted is to be cast into the outer darkness, where there is a satisfying wailing and gnashing of teeth.

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  3. "The attempt to blame the Holocaust on the long history of
    antisemitism among Christians diminishes the scope of the Nazis'
    aspirations."

    A Nazi ad agency actually came up with a popular campaign making this point:

    "We're Nazis. We're Number 2 -- we try harder."

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    1. Well, I know it cheapens the tone around here, though it has way far to go before it gets down to where you usually hang out, but I can't resist the opportunity to point out that you'd know all about that as everything you say is "Number 2".

      I would like to as someone at some place like Eschaton who would know, someone like Echidne or even Duncan or one of the actual people who know about real science over there what they think of the sampling and other issues of this study and the real conclusions about the validity of the claims of the reasearchers on the basis of that and its ridiculous methodology. And, now that I've completely gone over your head with a low ball pitch,...

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  4. I actually agree with you about the bogus nature of that study, Sparky. I just don't give a shit about its methodological flaws, because anything that makes organized religion look bad is jake with me.
    :-)

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    1. So shock me, why don't you. You figure a lie is as good as the truth if it gets you what you want, confirming my point that since atheists don't figure it's a sin to tell a lie that the only thing that matters is a. what it gets you to lie, b. if you can get away with lying. It's how Hitler operated, too. Stalin, also. And tens of millions died as a result.

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  5. Sparky, you and the Seminarian™ are always screaming that people like Hitchens and Dawkins are unschooled in theology (entirely true). But they are Thomas Fucking Aquinas compared to what you two losers know about science. Is this just another example of the religious applying one standard to others, and one to themselves? Why yes. Yes, it is. And that is what the study showed. Religious children learn hypocrisy and double standards at a young age and many of them never outgrow it.
    Your critique would be a lot more devastating if you had a clue that this study has as much to do with evolutionary psychology as it does to archeology. And I was greatly impressed with the sophistication of your statistical arguments. The power analysis you performed on sample sizes was damning indeed. You should send your critique into the journal. Unfortunately, correspondence is limited to 1000 words. You couldn't order a latte in under 1000 words.
    If you are going to argue that people are not allowed to critique religion without a theological education, then you and the Seminarian™ should shut the fuck up about science. You have no idea how ignorant you are. It's like listening to 2 winos under a bridge discussing monetary policy.

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    1. Oh, so you believe this study used valid sampling sampling and the methodology shows what they claim it does?

      First, only a social scientist is stupid enough to think their sampling method could yield anything like a reliable indication of world populations that number in the tens of millions and the billions. Really, 280 children, not even randomly chosen, can stand in for the world population of Christians. That number doesn't even cover the number of major traditions in Christianity never mind being able to represent denominations. You really are that stupid and then you claim that I don't know anything about science.

      One thing that science hasn't surpassed is the requirement that it be logically coherent.

      Explain the "Dictator Game" they based this study on to me based on their description of it.

      I don't think RMJ and I know I haven't ever argued someone isn't allowed to critique religion even someone as pig-ignorant as you. But when someone as pig-ignorant as you does, people who know what they're talking about get to point out that you are pig-ignorant and replace knowledge with lies and bigotry.

      I strongly suspect your scientific career is as imaginary as Simels career as a Lothario.

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    2. Oh, and as to you whining about the length of my posts, I'm pretty sure you've never read more than part of one so big deal. I don't write for stupid people.

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    3. Once again, you prove you know nothing. Tell us since you are a brilliant statistician, what should the sample size be? Please do the power analysis for us to demonstrate it. All of the social sciences can not be dismissed just because you don't like it. You continually dismiss all of biology, all of physics, all of neuroscience, all of the social sciences. You have no knowledge of any of these fields as you repeatedly demonstrate. But you just wave your hand and say they're all crap. Because you say so? Your ignorance and total misunderstanding of science is a reflection on your lack of education, not an indication of its flaws.
      Do get back to us with your statistical analysis. Oh, they didn't teach statistics at the Twinkle Twinkle School of Music, did they?

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    4. Oh, no, you do the math, show us how a non-randomized sample of 280 children from, at most, seven cities in the world and I really doubt many of them came from Guangzhou, Izmir or Istanbul so, perhaps as few as four cities, can be used to make valid characterizations of perhaps 2.2 billion Christians in the world. I'd really like to hear your logical case for that. And you can begin by explaining to us how a non-randomly chosen sample of that size can be turned into a valid data set. I'd really love to hear you defend it.

      Of course when someone pretends that someone has presented themselves as they have not, you're taking a rather stupid coward's way out of defending the integrity of this clearly bogus study.

      I see you haven't chosen to even take the step of explaining the author's description of their "Dictator Game" I think any kid who was presented with that "task" as a "game" would think it was incredibly stupid. But, then, I have to remember you were once a child and I doubt you were any smarter then than you are now.

      So you're an Evo-psy-guy? A Just-so story as science guy? How hilarious that is. You evo-psys, pretending to do biology by making up stories for a time when the collection of data is impossible, it's just so hilarious. You're in the business of making up creation myths fit to order and calling it science, you're less rigorous than the creationists who at least have to come up with some kind of pretend science to match an already existent story that they don't get to change to fit what they want it to say.

      I think atheism has driven science into a decadent period, I think the replication scandal, the file-drawer scandal, the science made to order for the highest bidder scandal are just the tip of the rubbish heap of the scandal that materialist ideology as a generator of ideological science has led to.

      Hey, I've got no problem with any science which is, you know, based on careful observation, quantitative analysis, logical objective evaluation, review and which can, you know, stand the test of replication and further review of competent scientists. I'm just against the kind of science that makes stuff up and fudges the logical and statistical issues.

      Oh, and Evo-psy is social-sci, no matter how much you want to make believe it's anything else. It is the invasion of the crap standards of the social sciences into valid science, using Natural Selection to grease the tracks. I predict it will be seen as "pseudo-science" before two decades are passed.

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    5. I've told you over and over that I'm not a social scientist. All you guesses about me are laughably wrong. And I've already told you why I'm not going to allow you to stalk me.
      If you want to understand the game, read the damn paper. It's quite clearly described. It is not my job to explain it to you. You obviously can't and won't understand it. I am amazed that you insist on arguing against things you don't understand and don't even attempt to. Most of your arguments are against your own delusions, not anything science says.
      You are the one who keeps saying the sample size is inadequate. Prove your assertion. There is a precise way to determine that. You do the calculation, because you are the one saying it's wrong. You make the claim that the paper fudges the statistical issues. How the fuck would you know? You have obviously never studied statistics. Repeating over and over again that the statistics are wrong will never strengthen your argument. Do the power analysis and get back to us on the sample size.
      Yes, evo-psych is a branch of the social sciences. Who the fuck has ever said it isn't? But this paper has nothing to do with evo-psych. Why do you keep bringing it up? I have no idea why you are so obsessed with it even though it is completely irrelevant here.
      Natural selection is one of the most important foundations of modern biology. It cannot be removed just because you creationists don't like it. Your prediction about it is hilarious. Your savior on a stick will return before it is seen as pseudoscience. This paper also has nothing to do with natural selection. Why did you bring it up?

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    6. 1. I don't believe in the six-day creation, I believe in evolution of all known living species from a common ancestor, as I've stated from the beginning of my look into the reality of Natural Selection as it was first proposed, as it has constantly had to be patched up and as it has led to eugenics, neo-Malthusian proposals, early anti-vaxx agitation (Leonard Darwin's abortive attempt in politics, for example, based on his father's statements in Descent of Man) German eugenics - informed by American eugenics which was universally identified as an application of Natural Selection by every eugenicist I managed to read who commented on that aspect of it, the German eugenicists such as Baur, Fischer and Lenz, who it is certain Hitler read as he was forming his racial theories, the insane proto-Nazism of Haeckel, the neo-eugenics of people like Francis Crick, Arthur Jensen and William Schockley, and the revival of scientific racism, in general. It's really a rather bad scientific theory, not much like the theories of physics and chemistry, I think it's just an ideology more than a theory. I think it will eventually give way under its own inadequacies. I've asked a number of professional biologists and biology teachers to define it and got answers that were all over the place, one by a PhD who is a research biologist wanted to include genetic drift under it.

      You really can't come up with any way that their sampling was valid, can you. You're just trying to do what you've done in every single issue you've blathered on like Bruno Ganz's Hitler, brazen it out on the mistaken belief that your insults are going to hit their mark.

      I don't know how many times I have to demonstrate to you that you don't have what it takes for me to feel insulted by you, my belief that you're intelligent enough or honest enough for me to take you seriously. I find your continue jr. high level antics funny.

      You are such an idiot I really hoped you were in some ridiculous tail-chasing exercise like string-theory or multi-universe bull shit but I really do believe you're an Evo-psy creationist. No one else could be so incompetent at describing evolution as one of them.

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    7. I don't know how it works in the religion world, but in the real world, the burden of proof falls on the person making the assertion. You assert that the statistics are wrong because they come to a conclusion you don't like. That is not a valid argument in the real world. Prove that the statistics are wrong. And leave the fucking Nazis out of it.

      Your stupid insults do nothing to advance any of your arguments. Nor do they give anyone a good impression of people who call themselves Christians. I finally figured out who you really are. Bill O'Reilley. A loud mouth Catholic idiot who thinks yelling and repeating crap over and over again constitutes an argument.

      Did some ego-psych guy jilt you? Try to make you have anal sex? Why are you so fixated on it? I'll let you in on a little secret. There are whole groups of scientists who have big problems with it. It was a well respected evolutionary scientist, Stephen Jay Gould who applied the description that you keep using, Just So Stories. I personally also have a lot of problems with it.

      This paper has nothing to do with evolution, natural selection, evo-psych, eugenics, racial theories, or Nazis. What the fuck is wrong with you? Only someone who has a very disordered thought process would see them in this paper. Tell me, does mental illness run in your family? With proper treatment, you could live a relatively normal life. You don't have to suffer like this.

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    8. I know that atheist dodge, there is no such rule of discourse, anyone who is paying attention to an argument gets to decide who has the responsibility TO TRY TO CONVINCE THEM. You're the one making claims that a non-random sample of 280 children from at most seven cities in the world can be used to validly make characterizations of more than 2.2 billion people, that's a friggin' assertion, you atheist dolt.

      My insults? I'm just throwing them back to you. I tired an adult level of conversation, you're the one who went all 2nd grade playground. It's not my preferred mode of fighting but I'm not afraid to get down and dirty if it's necessary.

      You didn't read the paper did you. You didn't even read the first page of it, I quote

      Humans have evolved as highly cooperative species, and many
      forms of prosocial behavior emerge early in ontogeny, reflecting
      a biological predisposition

      And later on the same page

      Understanding the impact of religiosity on children’s altruism
      provides insights about how prosocial behavior is shaped by
      gene-culture coevolution

      Other than that there is no possibility for them to know that was a result of evolution except the Evo-psy style of making it up out of Natural Selection based conjecture - what those Just-so stories are based in, there is absolutely no evidence that genes are involved in any of this. That is pure conjecture based on assumptions of ultra-Darwinism, as Gould also called it.

      I'm sure you as a materialist determinist would have problems with someone calling making up creation myths like the Evo-psy guys do what it is, making up stories on the basis of nothing what so ever. That's not science, it's science fiction, only since so many people who get paid to do science get other people who do science to pretend they don't know that these people are making up fiction as science they get to live with it, now in the twilight of the evo-psy delusion and after, when even they have to accept that it is phony science. Scientists buy it, it gets called science, just as eugenics is science, bad not something you guys get to pretend didn't have the total approval of Darwin, Galton, Pearson.... Crick and Watson, for crying out loud. Richard Dawkins, between getting himself in the paper by saying at a little public school prof sitting his students on his knob is harmless and going after 14 year old geeks for being too brown said that a little eugenics was a good thing. The emeritus chair for the friggin' Public Understanding of Science pushing eugenics in the new millenium. But as he's the high pope of Darwinian fundamentalism, as Gould called it, there's no surprise he would push eugenics. Eugenics will always rise up like poisonous gas as long as Natural Selection is the required framing of evolution.

      You're unable to defend the paper, aren't you, even you aren't going to try to do what's so obviously impossible, turn their pathetically invalid sampling and methodology into what they are peddling it as showing. I think you might be just smart enough to realize that once someone has pointed it out. You're clearly too stupid to get their on your own.

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    9. I made absolutely no claims about the sample sizes used in the study. YOU made those claims and haven't even tried to support them.
      You really have no understanding of how to read a paper. Do you have any idea of the purpose and structure of an Introduction? Of course not. They are laying out the broadest possible context that prosocial behavior has both biological (it is seen in many species) and environmental factors. Then they immediately abandon any talk about biology and then investigate religiosity which is a purely cultural and environmental factor. This is not an evo-psych paper. Read the Discussion. Nowhere do they talk about biology, genes or evolution or your obsession, evo-psych. The didn't even bring up eugenics, Nazis or anal sex.

      "there is absolutely no evidence that genes are involved in any of this."
      That is because that is a claim that absolutely no one is making. How on earth did you come up with that? Is English not you native language? Religiosity has nothing to do with genetics and nobody said it did. You are arguing with some weird idea that exists only in your head. I repeat. Nobody is claiming that these results have anything to do with biology.

      Enough with the fucking eugenics! This paper has nothing to do with that. But you see eugenics everywhere you look. There is a term for seeing things that aren't there. It called hallucinations. That is a clear sign of your mental illness. How many of your family are afflicted with this disease?

      I am not defending the paper at all. Show me the quote where I do. Show me where I agreed with the conclusions. Show me where I defended the sample size. These are pure hallucinations on your part. I am simply asking you to support your ignorant claims that the paper is flawed or a fraud. Go ahead. Go learn some statistics and prove, with math, not yelling, that their sample sizes are wrong. Let me guess, you'll ignore that. Then you will repeat what you have repeated a thousand times already that all science is wrong because it leads inevitably to eugenics. Hey, if you want to avoid science, then move to a cave in the Sinai. There you will enjoy a life of religion without the contamination of science. Nobody will miss you.

      Show us your power calculations and support your claim. You didn't even read their statistical methods did you? You don't know what any of it means. How can you possibly complain about their sampling and methodology when you have no understanding of it at all? But it must be wrong because you say so. I guess in the religious world no facts or evidence are ever presented, so you never learned how to do that. Any crackpot can get up and babble like you do. Rev. Billy Bob told you the divine truth about science and being a gullible idiot, you ate it up.

      We await your statistical analysis. Maybe you could get The Seminarian™ to help you. He knows as much about math and science as you do. And stop making up shit that I am claiming this or defending that. Those are voices in your head. Don't they have psychiatrists in Beavertail?

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    10. Well, that proves you didn't read the study because I wasn't the one who made the claims about the sizes of the samples, THE AUTHORS OF THE FRIGGIN' STUDY AS PUBLISHED IN CELL: CURRENT BIOLOGY DID!

      I read the statistical methods, as it is clear you didn't. There is still no way you can make a non-randomized sample of those sizes and collected in that manner make any kind of logically coherent speculation that you've found anything valid about a universal set 2.2 billion/280 times larger than your sample.

      I gave the statement of why that wasn't true from one of the most prominent living statisticians in the English language, as social scientists on the make and the atheists who love their phony studies always do, they figure those rules don't apply to what they do. I would challenge you to find any legitimate statistical textbooks for beginners which would not call samples of that description an invalid means of discerning anything about the differences between groups as varied as Christians are or Muslims, or even "not believing" which is obviously oddly defined by the researchers as well considering the groups whose numbers they threw out of the study.

      No matter what contortions you go through you can't turn such an entirely non-randomly chosen sample of a population of 2.2 billion people into something useful to show you something reliably true about that population. I doubt you could even make it work if the claims weren't based on some idiotic, totally artificial "game" that had nothing to do with the real lives of those 280 children. You couldn't even have protected the data from a few of the 12 or 8 year olds feeling ornery enough to be messing with the adult who presented such a lame-brained idea of a "game" to them.

      This is crap science and anyone who honestly read the thing and thought about it with or without the mathematical manipulation of the data to come up with their preferred results would admit that. You know damn well that that's the case or you'd come up with the argument that would blow my skepticism about it out of the water.

      The quality of your skepticism is crap, it belongs in a "Skeptic tank".

      You, like all the blog atheists I've ever encountered are the embodiment of William James' observation about people who don't think but merely rearrange prejudices.

      If you think you've ever said a single thing that would make me feel in the least bit uneasy about your insults you are both stupid and delusional. If you'd refuted anything I've said, yes, that might make me a bit concerned that I'd said anything that might be invalid, but you haven't done that even once.

      Any university which would give you any kind of degree in science clearly has a lot wrong with whatever faculty that conferred it. There seems to be a lot of that around today, as you can read in Retraction Watch and other sources of information of the crisis in bogus science in this brave materialist-atheist-liar ruled intellectual culture.

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    11. You are a complete idiot. How many times have you said the sample sizes are inadequate? And what evidence have you presented to support that claim? Zero. You have no fucking clue about statistics but you keep yelling this. It isn't a goddamn rosary. Repetition might fill you with sanctifying gave. In the real world it says you are a toddler. Your generic quote didn't say what would be an adequate sample in this study. If 1170 is too small a sample size, please use your vast mathematical talents to tell how many would be enough. A specific number. You made the moronic claim. You go to the elementary statistics book and figure out what that number should be.
      Yes, according to you its crap science. But then all science is crap to you. You just wave your hands and say the study is wrong because you say it's wrong. Only in your mind would that constitute an argument.
      If this study is wrong then you do a study. Pry a bunch of priests off the altar boys and send them out to measure altruism and judgementalism. We await your study.
      Tell me, is there any area in which you have any knowledge? I have yet to see you demonstrate any competence in any subject. Science, math, history, and even rudimentary English are beyond your grasp. But you sure can go on and on and on repeating the same claims over and over. I am shocked that there are parents who leave their children alone with such an incompetant lunatic. Is everyone in your family as mentally ill as you?
      If a sample of 1170 is inadequate, show us the power calculation that says what the right number should be. Your response will be be another tantrum. Blah blah blah. Atheists are bad, science is wrong, universities are frauds, only failed musicians know the truth. No wonder you are stuck where you are. You couldn't make it anywhere else, so you crawled back to mommy's house.
      By the way, if you were an actual Christian, shouldn't we be able to tell that from your love and charity? Oh, that's right. You failed there, too.

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    12. I'm really finding this fascinating, for a low-grade blog troll who, as I recall, as someone like David Derbes convinced he's a scientist you actually are pretending to not see the enormous problems with the sampling in this study.

      1. Leaving aside the entire relevant issue of 280 children who were not chosen by any random method, being unable to comprise a representative sample of 2.2 billion people.

      2. All of those children came from seven cities, there are no suburban or rural children represented in the sample.

      3. None of those cities were in Europe or Latin America, two of the continents with the highest populations of Christians in the world. None of them were from Australia or New Zealand, another region with a significant proportion of that 2.2 billion Christians the study purports to characterize.

      4. As mentioned, the children were recruited from schools. Given the sample size, I wouldn't be surprised if all of the children studied in any one city had been recruited from one school in each city. We don't know that from the description but I doubt the sample from, say, Chicago was recruited from a broad spectrum of the cities' schools. Any school's population is generally NOT even representative of the population of the city but skewed by the neighborhood it is in directly related to economic class, ethnicity and other factors. Ethnicity is often, though not always, associated with differences in concentration of specific religious denominations. That can make all the difference when it is the entire spectrum of Christianity which is allegedly being characterized. There is all the world of difference between a demonination which stresses the obligation to be generous, to treat other people with justice and those which don't. The Phelps cult is called "Christianity" the United Church of Christ is also called Christianity. And there is the entire range of emphasis on those central teachings of Jesus within that category of "Christianity".

      5. I've acknowledged there are vast differences among athests, some of them are extremely honest and generous, such as Richard Lewontin, some of them are like you. I wouldn't hold that the "not religious" category which is entirely undefined in the study could be held to even be a category for any scientific purposes, could be honestly characterized by the 323 children shoehorned into that category. I will point out that given their undefined criteria for that assignment (from what I read in their study, it would seem they excluded agnostics from it) it would be easy as anything to pad the figures as desired. Only, who knows? They didn't include enough information to see if that was the case.

      This is totally crap science, though it's the kind of science you guys like because it produces the desired results, the same reason it gets in the news with such uncritical evaluation of it ever being done. I suspect that that jig is about up, though, as I'm seeing more criticism of junk like the Pew survey and they are one of the less dishonest venues of this stuff. Barry Kosmin's stuff isn't nearly as honest.

      Keep it going, I want to have it documented how entirely dishonest you are.

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    13. Oh, and I would point out that Cape Town is hardly representative of Africa or Guangzhou typical of China. I know for a fact that anyone on the East coast, the Prairie provinces or the West or North of Canada would either laugh out loud or punch someone in the face if they said the population of Toronto was typical of the Canadian population. There is no way for this study as science to pass the laugh test.

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    14. I'd love to see what your face would look like if you went into a hard core Quebecois bar and made the statement that they were just like the folks in TO.

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    15. "I'd love to see what your face would look like if you went into a hard core Quebecois bar"

      You'll have to go without me. I'm not into rough trade.

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    16. Oh, that much French taxed your capacious learning, did it? I always did hold there are few people as limited as some sci-guys from the city. NYC area? The home of the most parochial of all Americans, many of whom make Texans look cosmopolitan in their outlook, never mind people from small town Maine.

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  6. "Simels career as a Lothario."

    Does anybody have a clue what that's supposed to mean? Because I sure don't.

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    1. Look it up in a dictionary. Under "L".

      It means what you do when you brag about your sex life at Duncan Jr. High on the Delaware. I'd go into details but in some time zones people might be about to eat a meal.

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  7. I have never bragged about any such thing. You're out of your fuckng mind and a sick bastard.

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    1. Oh, come on, Stevie, I know there's not a lot there but you have done it. And, as I was comparing your sex life to the amount of scientific knowledge that Septic Tank is demonstrating here, it doesn't have to amount to much.

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