Quote:
Originally posted by Tenspace
Good idea, but it wouldn't work. There are too many other factors that affect health and lifespan, which are drastically different per human population. For example, the "Japs", as you call them, can't stomach most dairy products, especially aged cheeses. OTOH, Americans eat a whole lot less rice than the Japanese.
This experiment, testing the efficacy of intercessory prayer, has been performed before, and quite accurately. The only reason so many people want more experimentation, is because they personally don't agree with the results so far.
Tenspace
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Exactly right. I can think of a better way to test for an independent effect of religious belief on longevity. Its probably impractical if not impossible, but . . . you could contact a very large sample of monozygotic twins, find those sets which are discordant for religious belief, and see if there is any signficant difference between the belief/no belief groups. You'd have to wait for most of them to die, however, before you got an answer, and you'd still have to rule out the presence of other confounding variables. Anyway, I think something like this was done with vitamin C, and showed that vitamin C did not result in quicker recovery from colds (or something like that).
Patrick
05-18-2003, 10:10 AM
