Prometheus

I'd go for Derren Brown too - i like how he uses his abilities to demonstrate how easily manipulated we are into believing untrue things. Very good live performances too - better than the TV stuff.

I agree on most things you have said, but not this point. There will always be 'conflict' between people: different values, different ideas, different priorities etc... And that is a good thing: pluralistic societies seem to thrive, and the friction generated when people with different ideas clash provides impetus to always seeking better solutions. Such conflict does need to be kept in check, to keep it from escalating into violence, but i think the clash must be allowed to happen for society to be healthy. Way off-topic here but i feel some of the frustrations of the right-wing are fuelled by a perception that they are not allowed to clash in this way - they feel constrained by a political correctness that drowns out their voices. I don't think we should try to drown out, say, homophobic or xenophobic statements so long as people are within the law and not inciting actual violence: doing so just drives it underground where it simmers and sometimes boils over into violence.

Yes, that's the sort of thing i was hoping for, except this study looks explicitly at religious violence and its antecedents rather than violence in general. Also they only refer to the model they actually use obliquely so it's hard to assess. I can't work out whether they do this because the terms they use to describe the model are so well known in their field that they do not require elaboration or whether they don't really know themselves so gloss over any details. They do give the source of their data though, so it might be possible to build our own model: yet another side-project to put on the back-burner. Thanks for finding that though - i'll have a more thorough look when i finish my current work.

No idea about the legality. but there are some interesting ramifications for medicine in general. There is a push in medicine towards patient empowerment and the idea of the expert patient: i.e. patients so well informed and educated about their condition they will know more about it than most healthcare professionals. If this is a genuine drive, then there will come a point when patients will make a decision contrary to current medical advice - particularly in a global market where certain treatments have different criteria in various places in the world. I'm not sure we can have one without the other.

Well, to move forwards i wonder whether we can look at how we could use data to distinguish any differences. For instance, for some metric of religiosity (self-defined perhaps?), we could look at instances of violence across the globe. Maybe something like all deaths perpetrated by a group or individual in the name a religion. We cold also look for confounders such as socio-economic status and political affiliations. Then we might be able to test whether certain religions are statistically more violent than others. Maybe we could use secular states as a baseline. Further we might be able to use an unsupervised statistical learning algorithm to classify the various religions based on incidence of violence associated with it. Once the algorithm classifies the religions by violence we could start to look for qualitative differences between the groups and similarities within the groups to draw out what particulars of religion lead to increased violence. I know it would be a messy undertaking, but in such a data rich world it must be possible to start to get some handle on it. Surely some sociologists have started to do this? I couldn't find anything at a quick glance.

For sure if you define something too broadly then it becomes meaningless, and i also agree that definitions are not immutable in their meaning. Therefore the context in which we discuss these ideas becomes important. A key point, in light of the OP, is that some religions encourage massacres and others do not. Christianity and Islam have big problems with their scripture being used to massacre people: Jainism does not. So what is the difference? To start to investigate the difference we need to look at the nuances: they have become pertinent to the discussion at hand, and are not simply a matter of semantics.

As i said before: I simply think you paint with too broad a brush and miss out on some interesting nuances in the process. This mysticism isn't an integral part of Buddhism, or Confucianism and maybe other religions (or philosophies if you prefer), for many people. Why can't you accept that? I'd recommend reading some Stephen Batchelor books, he explains it well. The reason i feel this pertinent is that many people find there are parts of religion they like and parts they dislike, even abhor. Many of the parts they dislike are mystical in nature - we can simply do away with these parts. But by being so insistent that religion must have mystical elements, i think we lose many people who might be culturally inclined towards a given religion, but otherwise ready to embrace essentially humanist ideals. That's one interpretation, far from the only. I'll try to dig up some Alan Watts lectures if you're interested in another perspective?

But that's the whole point: there isn't (in Buddhism) any levels of satori or enlightenment - you don't experience the world any differently. How is this merely semantics? P.S. I really don't think it's controversial to say that various religions are different, some more so than others - it's just a matter of scale. At a great enough distance we could say they are all the same, and as we get closer more details manifest from which we can distinguish them. The only point of contention is what scale is the most useful in a given context.

I find it hard to talk about Hinduism as its such a broad term for a whole range of beliefs, and even those beliefs are changing as the guru tradition is still alive, adding and subtracting from the existing body of knowledge. Buddhism is like that too to a lesser extent, so i'll talk about the Buddhism i know, while acknowledging there are some very different practices. So in Buddhism we are taught that thinking there is anything to transcend, or there is some transcendental realm, is a trap. It's the same idea that eating chocolate (i.e. hedonism) will bring you eternal happiness - thinking there is something transcendental to attain or realise just leads to 'spiritual' pride and one-up-manship and you chasing your tail. Nothing wrong with chasing your tail if you enjoy it, but many people don't. So i disagree that religion necessarily requires a belief in anything transcendental (although i admit it usually does, i just want to labour the point that it doesn't always). Unless you want to strictly define religion in that way, but that excludes a lot of what we normally think of as religion (Buddhism, Confucianism, parts of Hinduism). We've been here before - it's not just semantic squibbling: there is a fundamental difference between eastern religions and western religions. My in-laws are Confucian, very active in their local temple, but by any of your standards they are not at all religious, because they don't buy into anything transcendental or super-natural required. Going to their temples is more like going to a graveyard - its a place of gravity and reflection, surrounded by some symbols to get into that frame of mind. For the sake of my sanity i might just have to agree, but i think this is a very Western perspective and demonstrably false. The other option is that we expand what we mean by religion to include what other parts of the world think too. A zen Buddhist saying: If you see the Buddha by the side of the road kill him. I think all my answers are way off topic, so i apologise: they are perhaps more suited to the atheism and spirituality thread. I'll pick this up there later.

Yes, i agree the ideals we choose to live by, whether religious or political, need to be moderate to avoid such atrocities. But theism isn't a requisite for religion: that's a very Western perspective. Maybe we could say theism is a sufficient condition for religion (though Jimmy may disagree) but not a necessary condition. Some (most?) people just don'y worry about it that much and are happy to take whatever ideology society is handing out.

I only claimed that the material lot of most people in Western societies has improved under capitalism, nothing about the gap between rich and poor. I made this point only to highlight that capitalism isn't unmitigated pure evil, even if the good it does is a accidental.

Capitalism has given the masses comforts previously only enjoyed by the rich. Having lots wrong with a system doesn't mean it is all wrong. Theism isn't necessary for a religion. Again, i agree there is plenty wrong with religion, but that isn't the same as it all being bad. America and China.

Religion has good elements and bad elements: let's try to keep the former and discard the latter. Capitalism has good elements and bad elements - guess what we should try to do?

Hypatia of Alexandria.

I don't know of one that covers all these subjects There should be some books on stats for ecology, that's your best bet, i know ecologists usually deal with wide data sets like yours.

For sure. My dad was raised in India. He tells us stories about catching pythons as a kid to milk them for venom. We think he's a bit crazy.

I think the initial reaction is more visceral than that. I remember as a kid going to the continent and seeing cops with guns. I felt scared. I still feel uneasy whenever i see cops with guns, either abroad or increasingly in London. Then we check the stats and yep, just as we thought violence follows in their wake: no surprise, they are designed to kill. I can imagine certain professions are locations require guns due to the stresses of nature, but not for the average joe. And now they are also a symbol of how our society is held in fear by Islamic terrorism - that our cops, once bobbies on the beat you could stop to chat to, are now armed to the teeth and suspicious of anyone approaching them. Then we look across the pond and see a society in love with that symbol of fear and terror. I can't emphasise enough just how crazy some gun advocates come across. It is scary how much they love guns.

The difference is that we might decide to terminate or prevent a pregnancy because the child would live a life full of suffering, whereas others would terminate/prevent to pregnancy because of its cost, or lack of benefit, to society. Many people feel the latter shouldn't come into the equation.

So essentially you are testing multiple hypotheses: that competition effects trait 1, that competition effects trait 2,..., that competition effects trait n. The first problem you have is that the type 1 error rate will be inflated. There are ways to mitigate against this; they generally involve larger sample sizes.(have you done a power calculation - did you know roughly what degree of difference in the traits to anticipate?). Another way around this, especially if there are a very large number of traits, might be to consider dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA or LASSO - particularly if you think the traits might have some roughly linear correlation. This will reduce the number of traits you need to consider, but may make interpreting results a little more difficult. MANOVA, or similar, might also work, you'd only be testing one hypothesis - but then you will not be able to draw conclusions about individual traits, just the traits as a cluster. Another approach, although i'm scraping the barrel here, would be to treat it as a classification problem. You'd then be answering the question: given certain traits, did the larva undergo competition. Would be handy if that is all you care about. I'm just brainstorming though. You should actually consult a statistician - preferably one with ecology experience.

It is sometimes possible to smell pearl drops (a hard boiled sweet in England) on the breath of people going into diabetic ketoacidosis - though i can never smell anything even when others can. I've heard of dogs used to detect cancer. I quick look and i found this paper which found a sensitivity and specificity of 91%. Not bad.

Through our senses we receive information from the world and we find a world full of meaning. It means something to us because the information is being transformed into the brain, and the human brain is an organ of meaning. To me, spirituality is this process of creating meaning in the world.

How do you plan to measure competition (binary?) and the life history traits? So it sounds like you'll have one independent (competition) and several dependent (traits) variables? Is that right?

I don't know much about humanism: is it able to to perform the functions that many people expect of religion? Things like marriages, funerals, christenings, community activities and charities, pastoral support especially for the dying (something otherwise desperately lacking in hospitals)etc... If it can then it may be a good way for people to move away from theism. Maybe this is too off topic, but there's a new thread on atheism and spirituality that might be appropriate.

Not according to this, but it only starts from 2000 so longer term trends will not be visible. Maybe you can find records dating back further. But before thinking there is an increase we should consider: increased global reporting, better detection methods extending to remote areas and increased population density (i.e. more earthquakes pertinent to humans).