From: Dr. Blake Nelson (bnelson301@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 10:58:13 EDT
I don't have time at the moment to find the actual
research, but the survey I believe Dawkins is
referring to is the reproduction of the Leuba (1916)
survey done by Edward Larson, a historian at the
University of Georgia and Larry Witham, a journalist
from Burtonsville, Maryland.
They randomly selected 1,000 scientists from the
reference book, American Men and Women of Science – a
modern version of the 1910 compendium that Leuba used.
They did not attempt to randomly select NAS members
for a survey of NAS members (and IIRC did not
oversample that subpopulation to try to get a good
representation of that subpopulation). So any results
someone gets by looking at the 600 respondents to the
survey who happened to be NAS members are
statistically invalid. Unless someone did a
*different* survey, specifically randomly sampling NAS
members, we don't know what they likely believe as an
aggregate group. (Again, leaving aside whether we
should care.)
--- Dawsonzhu@aol.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > My response to that bit of sophistry was that why
> > would a "champion of rationality" used data he
> should
> > know are bad to try to make an argument based on
> > authority (again, aside from the fact that I don't
> > think NAS members are authorities, per se, on
> > religion)?
> >
>
> Actually, I am a bit puzzled here. I seem to
> remember a
> brief article in Nature (cir. 98) where some
> historians?
> claimed that they had sent out a questionare to
> people
> in NAS and that, whereas in cir. 1900, roughly 50%
> believed
> in God, now there were only 7%. It was a bit funny
> because
> the numbers didn't add up to 100%.
>
> Was that shown to be an incorrect study?
>
> In Christ
> Wayne
>
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