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1. The religiousness of scientists is considerably lower than that of the US general public:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001419.html

2. Religions from time to time decides to go a round against science. Religion, as a rule, loses out.

3. The real killer is evolution of course. As the far more eloquent than me John Derbyshire puts it:

http://www.olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentar y/FaithFAQ.htm

"I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God's image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God's image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God's image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there's nothing special about us at all.

Now of course there are ways to finesse that point--intellectuals can cook up an argument for anything, and religious intellectuals, who cut their teeth on justifying some wildly improbable stuff, are especially ingenious--but the cumulative effect of dozens of factlets like this is devastating to the notion that human beings are a special creation. And without that notion, traditional religious belief is holed below the water line. The more you read and learn in the modern human sciences, the more your image of homo sap. fades back into our being just another branch on the tree of life, with all those wonderful features of ours--even language, the most wonderful feature of all--just adaptations, like fins or feathers, with an actual record of the adaptation written, and date-stamped, right there in the genome!"

It blew my mind to have pointed out to me (in John Derbyshire's EXCELLENT book Prime Obsession) that some infinite series sum to different values, depending upon the order in which the terms are added!

This amazing property is called "conditional convergence".

However, since we are dealing with only finite series in this instance, I think (hope) that we can assume that commutivity rules.

What's not getting mentioned in this light-hearted article, or the commentary, is the disastrous 2007 NASA budget. The idiotic "Vision for Space Exploration" coming out of the White House has made honest defenders of NASA's science initiative look like fools for declaring that science would not be cut. Well, it wasn't cut, it was eviscerated.

Most of the Slashdot discussion on this story I've read is about Intelligent Design and religion. Indeed, if you say "hostility to the implications of evolution," most people will assume you're thinking of religious-based opposition.

But some of the work acclaimed in the Science article is eventually going to horrify a large community of believers for a completely different reason.

You can read a well-written summary of the situation here.

Now, it would be tremendously useful if Gladwell had figured out some general rules of thumb for when to rely on your instantaneous hunches and when not to.

But as far as I can tell, his book reduces to two messages:

1. Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right
2. And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

Gladwell does make a genuinely useful point about how when people try to put their ideas into words, they often distort them into meaninglessness or falsehood.

Ironically, this happens to Gladwell every time he writes about race.

Because there were already plenty of books on the market advising corporate workers in tiresome detail how to look before they leap, the sales potential of a book telling them, "Wotthehell, just go ahead and leap," was clear.

Unfortunately for Gladwell, the best-known examples of thinking without thinking are racial and gender prejudices. But, then, you've forgotten Rule #2--Readers despise logic and consistency. So Gladwell just assumes that his otherwise beloved "rapid cognition" is 100% wrong whenever it's based on race or gender stereotypes.

(And that's why he makes a $1 million annually and I don't.)

The most intriguing aspect of Gladwell's book is that its hopeless confusion and mind-melting political correctness stem from the author's own racial background. Although mostly white, Gladwell is partly of African descent (his mother was black, Scottish, and Jewish). But he doesn't look noticeably black in most of his pictures.

The origin of Blink, he writes on his website, came when, "on a whim," he let his hair grow long into a loose but large Afro.

As you can see in this picture of Gladwell with his Afro, he wound up with more of a Napoleon Dynamite Mormon 'fro than the genuine kinky kind that ABA basketball players espoused back in the 1970s. Still, it does finally make him look marginally black.

As soon as Gladwell grew his Afro, he claims, he started getting hassled by The Man: highway patrolmen wrote him speeding tickets, airport security gave him the evil eye, and the NYPD questioned him for 20 minutes because they were looking for a rapist with an Afro.

"That episode on the street got me th

I don't see how you can ever have enough nukes. Nukes are very, very scary. A nation with 20,000 of them is a very, very scary nation. That's the kind of nation I want to live in, so long as it is under rational, constitutional government.

Why not cite his own explaination of his homophobia?

Those interested in his other writings should check out John Derbyshire's homepage.

Berkeley Groks has an interview that aired today with John Derbyshire discussing the Riemann Hypothesis. He states that after talking with many mathematicians in the field, the prospects for a solution any time soon are quite low.

Had responded to the article before I saw your comment. There, I wrote:

For whatever it's worth, John Derbyshire self-published his second novel (his first novel, and his subsequent pop-math book about Prime Number theory were published traditionally, and have been modest successes) using a Print-on-Demand shop. His account of the whole self-publishing experience (he's generally happy about it) can be read here.

For whatever it's worth, John Derbyshire self-published his second novel (his first novel, and his subsequent pop-math book about Prime Number theory were published traditionally, and have been modest successes) using a Print-on-Demand shop. His account of the whole self-publishing experience (he's generally happy about it) can be read here.

An anonymous reader writes "Alan Gore [no, not the inventor of the internet] and John Derbyshire have weighed in on outsourcing. They're both old-school big iron guys, and both exude a flair for classical libertarianism, but even they see the writing on the wall. Gore imagines a September 11, 2011, during the second Hillary Rodham administration, when all our outsourced systems suddenly say, 'You've been 0wn3d!' Derbyshire, on the other hand, is reacting to a bizarre phenomenon that's here already: African-American parents sending their children to boarding schools in AFRICA, because it's cheaper than sending them to day school here in America. Derb asks, 'Feel the ground shifting under your feet? If you don't, you soon will.'"