Foxy,

1 You did not provide any links to the actual study only to articles that referred to the study. And these articles differed substantially from the conclusions that Dr RK reached.

2 The study referred to in social neuroscience is only available on payment, and the abstract shows that the study is not looking at the RA or ACC.

3 The other studies to which you refer used electroencephalographs that record signals from the brain on the surface of the skull. As the ACC is deep within the brain, separating signals from ACC from the rest of the brain is impossible.

4 Paul clearly did not read the study only the articles

SM,

"Secondly in this instance, as BL has been operating outside the purely academic realm for more than a decade I was not referring only to the citations of his peer reviewed papers in other peer review papers, rather to his citations in the wall street journal and other non academic literature. This puts him as one of the most cited contemporary academics."

Yes, I'm sure he's simply wonderful (although I wouldn't consider being mentioned ad nauseam in anything Murdoch publishes as a claim to fame or integrity:)

In fact one wonders why, if he's such a spectacular success, he could only get a gig by teaming up with an international backwater denier govt like ours?

I mean where are Harvard and Oxford?

And why is it necessary to throw $4 million of taxpayer's money at a uni to entice them to collaborate with him.

You'd think they would jump at the chance since he's such an international superstar (although for some obscure reason our own well read Shadow Minister had never heard of him)

5 Correlation is not causation. All it does is throw up a myriad of questions, with the first and most obvious being differences within the sample that were not noted.

The tabloids and speculative gossip shows on The Box provide examples daily, which are only taken as entertainment one hopes.

Fox,

What you are doing is splitting the world into good and bad, B&W, according to your own limited world view and to rationalise and bolster your jaundiced view of anyone who disagrees with you.

BTT

Dear Shadow Minister,

The links that I provided actually did more than
you claim had you bothered to read them in full.
Just as one example - these two neuro studies found
as follows:

1) The Amodio study (Neurocognitive Correlates of
Liberalism and Conservatism, 2007) and the Kanai study
(Political Orientations are correlated with Brain
Structure, 2011) found similar results when comparing
the neuroanatomy of Liberals and Conservatives.

2) The Amodio study found that Liberalism correlated
with greater activity in the ACC while the Kanai study found
that Liberalism correlated with increased gray matter volume
or a larger ACC as shown in MRI scans. Additionally the
Kanai study found that Conservatism was correlated with
increased volume of the right amygdala.

I would suggest that you go back and read the
Conclusions and discussions.
It may clarify things for you.

otb,

Placing the blame on me
for your behaviour on this forum is not going
to work

Here's an interesting aside, SM.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-09/students-praise-uwa-for-ditching-bjorn-lomborg-think-tank/6457210

"The fact that we had international partners saying they wanted to pull out because of the association. So the reputational damage was probably the main complaint.

"There are a number of people who take issue with Lomborg's methodology, and with Lomborg's sort of research standing.

"The example that I use is there was a unit at UWA that used to use Lomborg's book as an example of bad science, and what not to do for students, and so a primary concern was the fact that he would be allowed to be associated with UWA when we hold our first year students who are 17, right out of high school, to a higher standard than that."

What should be made clear, is that people vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, sometimes for quite an illogical reason, such as "I always vote Labor".
I have said before I find many Labor voters to be more conservative than some Liberal voters. I'm sure even our friend Shadow Minister has deep down, somewhere in his cerebellum, a radical thought or two, like "Me thinks me will put me sugar on me Rice Krispies this morning after me put zee milk on, how radical is that."
I have never come across anyone who's views are totally conservative or totally radical, generally people are a mix of both depending on the issue, and that reflects the policies of the mainstream political parties in Australia.

Is Mise, I'm not familiar with the "issues" in Britain. The Conservatives did particularly well, Labour over there has a lot of soul searching to do. The Scottish Nationals did outstanding, winning something like 56 seats, and Whitehall will have to once more address the issue of Scottish independence