A little while ago I was talking with my friends, and the subject of asshole drivers on the highway came up. I jokingly suggested that this was due to velocity having a negative effect on human IQ. This would explain why the stupidest drivers always seem to be the ones going the fastest. I was going to leave it at that, but I was curious to see what other phenomena my “theory” could explain. The Overview Effect (discussed here previously), where astronauts are dumbfounded by looking at the Earth, is one. I then tried to see if there was any evidence showing a decrease in intelligence as one moves towards the equator (which is moving faster due to the Earth’s rotation). Obvious jokes about “the South” aside, I gathered some data on the importance of religion in various countries and the latitudes of their capital cities. (Before you write an angry post, remember that this is just a joke, and I am not actually trying to conflate “being religious” with “being stupid”. In fact, I wouldn’t have mentioned this except that there IS a striking pattern in the graph)

Even ignoring the trend line that MS Excel drew through it, you can see that as the latitude increases, on average the importance of religion decreases. So what does this mean? Have I stumbled across some amazing new scientific discovery?

Of course not.

This whole “theory” is rubbish. I chose only to include observations that supported it, and left everything else out. I conveniently omitted the fact that I’m using a different reference frame for velocity in each case. And Einstein himself showed that it is *physically impossible* to detect absolute velocity; one can only sense acceleration. The correlation on the graph is either pure coincidence or due to some other factors (for example, it is possible that poor countries are more religious, and countries near the equator tend to be poorer). The only reason why I put this here is to illustrate how easy it is to make a theory that sounds reasonable, and how wary you must be of claims that something is “scientifically proven” (especially if it’s by someone trying to sell you something). Even if they have pretty graphs and staistics that are based on cold hard data and seem to be supporting the claims, you still need to think critically and make sure for yourself that everything fits together, and isn’t just a bogus theory like this one.