As Yonat Shimron writes for Religious News Service, a “study suggests ‘born-again’ believers have smaller brains.”
Who has more brains?
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5 responses to “Who has more brains?”
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Well, as with other parts of the human anatomy, size may not be nearly as important as how you use what you have…
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I have to ask: if this study had suggested instead that born-again believers and Catholics have bigger brains, would a link to it have been posted here?
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Dear Mr. Palad, I’m not sure why you’re asking this question. Can you clarify? It sounds partisan but I’m not sure which point you want to make.
awr-
The challenge to make a truly partisan remark about this is attractive, so here’s an attempt. One might conjecture that a more detailed study would have found that born-again Christians and Catholic converts would have the smallest brains, that Catholics generally have smaller brains than mainline Protestants, while liturgists (whether Catholic or not) have the largest brains of all. A scientist would then have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between brain size and religious perspicacity. (All in good clean fun, of course, being myself a convert.)
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I find articles like this to be very frustrating–and a true testament to the reality that quantitative studies like this, as much as their perpetrators may tout “fact” and “real measurable data,” are incredibly flawed.
If anyone should find links online to the actual study, I’d appreciate knowing them; this article simply indicates that of the 268 adults studied over 10 years’ time, there was a correlation (how much of one, and whether there were outliers, was not indicated) to some areas of religious belief. And yet, a week after it hits USA Today, there are over 2,400,000 hits for a Google search on the topic.
If this were my study…I’d be sort of embarrassed.
–CF
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