Explaining the Secularity of Academics: Historical Questions and Psychological Findings

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, below, gathers a lot of evidence for his thesis. His basic point is that smart young men are less religious and are also attracted to the academic life.

So it is not a university background that makes you an unbeliever.  It is being an unbeliever that makes you an academic.

A small problem with that is that belief is widespread and the average IQ of religious and irreligious people is about the same.

I am more inclined to see personality factors as the influences at work.  For instance, academics are more impressed with their own wisdom so are egotistical.  And as egotists they have no need for a God.  Belief in God is humble -- you know how little you know. But many intellectuals think they know it all

I have a larger discussion of why elites tend Left here

Abstract

Religious beliefs are the products of natural, intuitive human thinking, and are shared by most humans. Academic research, or science, is the product of counter-intuitive, unnatural psychological processes, and the resulting concepts are beyond the reach of most. It is not surprising that religion has been around for possibly more than 100,000 years, while academic research is a recent historical development. Over the past century, individuals who make academic research their life’s work have been themselves the subject of academic studies which looked at their social origins, conscious ideals, beliefs, and psychological traits. The findings regarding religiosity have been striking. Academics, especially eminent ones, turn out to be quite irreligious. This is especially striking for academics in the United States, where a culture which is manifestly the most devout among First World nations has produced a sub-culture, which is a mirror image of itself. How can we explain the secularity of academics? Research indicates that it has to do with a process of selection and self-selection, which starts in childhood and channels individuals who are highly intelligent, critical, independent, and confident towards the academic world. Contrary to what some might think, it is not getting a Ph.D., which contributes to individual secularity; it is young secular individuals who are highly likely to commit themselves to an academic life

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Meet Jodie Comer's new man: Killing Eve star's lover is dashing lacrosse player from wealthy US family who grew up in a sprawling £1.2million mansion

She takes out her enemies in increasingly sadistic fashion as bisexual assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve.

Now, however, actress Jodie Comer has found herself the victim after hundreds of social media users called for her to be 'cancelled' – the modern equivalent of being chased with burning torches.

The Bafta-winner's apparent crime is that she is said to be dating an American supporter of Donald Trump's Republican party – despite playing a bisexual character in the hit BBC drama.

One Twitter user claims to have evidence that Miss Comer, 27, is in a relationship with James Burke, a lacrosse player whom she is said to have met in Boston.

Mr Burker, 26, was born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1994, to parents James and Christine Burke. He has two younger brothers, Brendan and Brady.

And he studied communication arts and sciences at university, according to his player profile.

He is now believed to have moved to Liverpool, where the actress lives. A picture posted online shows the pair on a boat with a group of people. Another depicts them posing with their heads together.

And the actress was recently pictured wearing a Boston Laxachusetts tracksuit top, Mr Burke's current lacrosse club in Boston, Massachusetts. A video, reportedly from Miss Comer's account but tagged with Mr Burke's Instagram username, shows her singing in the back of a car.

Screenshots from his alleged Instagram account – which has now been deactivated, as has his Spotify music account, which had a playlist titled Jodie's Songs – appeared to show he followed Mr Trump.

Official records in the US show that Mr Burke, from Boston, is a registered Republican voter – although many members of the party strongly oppose Mr Trump.

Some Twitter users – who seem, without any evidence, to equate anyone who follows Mr Trump to be also a Trump supporter and also agree with everything he says – have called for Miss Comer to be 'cancelled', claiming that her public support for the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBT rights are at odds with Republican beliefs.

One tweeted: 'Jodie Comer if you're reading this, you can't play a gay character and call yourself an ally when you're dating a Republican, you disgusting piece of s***.'

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SCOTUS Delivers Wins for Religious Liberty

In two 7-2 rulings yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered significant wins in defense of Americans’ First Amendment religious freedoms. In the first and most high-profile of the cases, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, SCOTUS ruled that the Trump administration’s expansion of an exemption for religious organizations to the contraception mandate in ObamaCare was legal for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. This expansion had allowed employers, on the basis of religious conviction and conscience, to opt out of covering contraception in their employees’ health-insurance plans.

In writing the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas observed, “For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother. But for the past seven years, they — like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision — have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Pennsylvania had argued that the Trump administration had failed to follow the appropriate guidelines when it expanded ObamaCare’s religious-exemption clause, an opinion the Court rejected. As Justice Thomas explained, “We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.”

The White House praised the ruling. “As the Supreme Court has previously stated,” said Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, “protecting the ability of people to worship and live according to the dictates of their conscience is part of ‘the best of our traditions.’ The Court’s decision today carries forward that noble tradition.”

Unsurprisingly, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing the minority opinion, blasted the decision as harmful to women’s rights: “Today, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree. Destructive of the Women’s Health Amendment, this Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets.”

Apparently, Ginsberg is outraged that in a free country, people often have to pay to obtain a service. Ginsburg’s understanding of “rights” clearly does not comport with that of the Founders nor the Constitution, but we digress.

In a move that further raises the stakes come November, Joe Biden declared that should he win the election, “I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the Hobby Lobby ruling.”

The second decision — and arguably the more consequential of the two — protects the right of churches and religious schools to be exempted from federal employment discrimination laws. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito stated, “Judicial review of the way religious schools discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way the First Amendment does not tolerate.”

In the wake of the Court’s abysmal ruling on Title VII, in which it redefined the term “sex” in order to expand anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation, this latest ruling helps to provide needed protection for churches and religious institutions so they can freely employ those they deem consistent in maintaining and upholding their religious practices and convictions.

These are both wins for Americans, no matter their religious or non-religious convictions, as they both support individual Liberty over and against the heavy hand of government.

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Few female engineers? It’s a matter of choice

The Australian Academy of Sciences recently changed its definition of a woman. According to the new definition, anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, regardless of their biological sex.

This definition has the clear advantage that people who don’t identify with their biological sex will now be recognised as their preferred gender, an obvious social justice issue.

However, with this new definition of woman, the academy is tacitly stating that biological sex is of no significance. Yet, at the same time, the academy is concerned with the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. So much so that to encourage women into STEM careers, the academy has fellowships, grants, and prizes designated for women only.

The existence of such fellowships, grants and prizes suggests that biological sex does matter and that we can encourage more women into STEM careers if we provide the right incentives.

So, does biological sex matter and can it help explain women’s career choices? Or is it irrelevant in general and to female under-representation in STEM?

To answer these questions, let’s take a look at the data on female under-representation in STEM. Is it the result of insufficient high-quality and affordable childcare? Probably not.

Countries with nearly free childcare, such as Sweden, Finland, and Norway, have some of the lowest number of women graduating from STEM subjects.

Is it due to pervasive inequality between men and women? Probably not. Countries that score the lowest in terms of gender equality, such as United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Turkey and Tunisia, have some of the highest number of female STEM graduates.

Is it prejudice against women in the sciences? Probably not. Women are not under-represented in STEM careers across the board. Far fewer women graduate with a PhD in engineering, mathematics, computer science and physics, but they slightly outnumber men in the biological sciences, and vastly outnumber men in the social and behavioural sciences, and the health sciences.

So why do women, on average, tend to make different choices than men?

To answer this question, we need to look at the ways in which males and females have been shaped by their evolutionary past.

The evolutionary success of all living organisms is measured by the number of offspring they produce that live to reproduce themselves. In other words, the more reproductively viable offspring one produces, the more successful one is in evolutionary terms.

Whatever heritable characteristics individuals have that allow them to produce and raise successful offspring will then be passed on to these offspring. In most animals, males and females differ in the ways they can achieve reproductive success.

Take elephant seals. During breeding season, male elephant seals spend most of their time fighting other elephant seals. The bigger and fatter the male, the more likely he is to defeat all other males in his group. Why does he care? Because only the winner will be able to mate with the females in the group. Almost every fertile female will mate and produce offspring, but most male elephant seals will produce none and a small minority will sire a large number of offspring in the few years in which they are the dominant male.

Biologists use a measure called effective population size to determine whether the number of reproducing males and females is equal in a population of organisms. In our elephant seal example, the effective population size of females is much larger than the effective population size of males.

But what does that have to do with humans? We don’t conduct our affairs like elephant seals, but the effective population sizes of men and women show a very similar pattern to elephant seals.

If we use Tinder as an example and count the number of times men swipe right on women versus the number of times women swipe right on men, humans look a lot like elephant seals. Almost all women on Tinder are swiped right by at least a few men, but many men are never swiped right at all, as the vast majority of female choices are aimed at a very small number of males.

Because the number of men and women is roughly equal, it follows that the reproductive success of men is far more variable than the reproductive success of women. For every man with multiple partners, there will be many men who have no partner at all. These differences in reproductive potential affect the manner in which males and females can increase their reproductive success.

For a man, the number of children he can conceive is constrained only by his access to fertile women. For a woman, the number of children she can rear to adulthood is constrained by her capacity and willingness to engage in repeat pregnancies. And rearing a human child is not an easy task. The primary reason for humanity’s position at the top of the food chain is our large brain. But that outsized brain also comes with associated costs.

Because of their large heads, human babies are born prematurely compared with other animals, as otherwise they couldn’t pass through the birth canal during birth. As a result, human babies take much longer to reach independence than the offspring of other apes.

Women, therefore, have been shaped over evolutionary time by their ability to successfully care for dependent children. Our ancestral mothers typically achieved this difficult task with lots of help from friends and family. So, men and women achieved reproductive success in fundamentally different ways. The most competitive men had the highest chance of leaving behind large numbers of children, typically in the care of their mothers. But the most successful women were those who forged strong social relationships with others to assist in rearing and providing for her children.

Female menopause is thought to have evolved so that older females shift from producing their own offspring to assisting with their grandchildren. Given the duration of parental care needed, an older female may not live long enough to rear her own child. Males have no such constraints.

In many human societies the presence of grandmothers increases the reproductive success of their children. For example, a study of pre-industrial French settlers in the St Lawrence Valley, Canada, during the 17th and 18th centuries showed that the presence of grandmothers increased the number of children born to their children. Our evolutionary history accounts for the physical differences we see between men and women. As in elephant seals, men are typically larger, more muscular (particularly in their upper body) and have higher levels of testosterone, all of which increase their probability of success in male-male competition.

Women typically have broader hips, more fat deposits on their buttocks, thighs, and breasts, and higher levels of oestrogen, all traits that increase their probability of bearing and raising a child. Our evolutionary history also had an effect on our brain, the seat of our mind. We all know the cliche. Men are great at reading maps but need women to find their car keys. In reality men and women are, on average, good at different things. STEM careers that are dominated by men all share a need for high levels of proficiency in mathematics. On average, boys are slightly more proficient than girls in mathematics. In contrast, girls outperform boys in verbal skills in every one of the 67 countries studied. Perhaps as a consequence of this difference in profiles, girls who are exceptional at mathematics also tend to be exceptional verbally. Boys gifted at mathematics tend to be less gifted verbally.

This means that girls who perform well in mathematics have many more career options open to them than boys who perform equally well in mathematics. The end result is that fewer women pursue math-intensive STEM careers than men, but this effect emerges only among women who are gifted both verbally and mathematically. Women who are better mathematically than verbally are just as likely as men to pursue a career in STEM.

Finally, even in STEM disciplines dominated by women, women remain under-represented at the full professor level, particularly at elite universities. Only a small percentage of PhD graduates in the sciences will ever become a full professor, which means that to get to the top a researcher needs to be highly competitive and willing to put in long hours. Surveys of highly gifted men and women show that the sexes differ in their priorities in this regard. Highly gifted men are more willing to work long hours and get more satisfaction out of work than highly gifted women. When asked what is most important in their career, these men are more concerned than women about getting a large salary and the ability to take risks In contrast, these women are more concerned about working no more than 40 hours a week and having strong friendships and time to socialise. Where the men get satisfaction from being the best in their field, satisfaction among these women is more tightly linked to the quality of their social relationships.

Clearly there are plenty of women who are highly competitive, and lots of men who value social relationships more than prestige. We have focused on average differences between the sexes, even though men and women are often more similar than they are different. But average differences matter. Most people seem to have no problem appreciating that men are typically better at weightlifting than women, but when it comes to career choices we are loath to consider biological differences between men and women.

If gender is a social construct and biological sex is insignificant, then society shouldn’t care that there are so few female engineers. But clearly society does care. Should our social goals of creating more female engineers trump our scientific goals of understanding why most women don’t want to be engineers? Ignoring our biological make-up can exacerbate the problems we’re trying to fix. Such an approach can also lead to an enormous waste of resources as we spend huge sums of money trying to recruit women into fields that appear not to interest them. Biological sex is real, it matters, and acceptance of that fact has no bearing on our social justice goals.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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