The Nirmukta Freethought Community

I reviewed the new Google Ngram Viewer here on Nirmukta, and I thought we could use the forums to experiment with the tool and analyze the results. I propose that we use the example of 'science vs religion' I present in the article above. Here are the results, for various time periods:









What information can we gain about trends in science and religion from this data? Please remember that there are many factors to be taken into consideration before using this data to determine any significant cultural trends. As pointed out in the article, this article published in Science by the researchers behind the Google tool presents scientific guidelines as to the proper use of the tool (Full article is available if you register on website of the journal Science). Feel free to do additional searches, narrow down or expand the criteria and make any necessary changes to derive meaningful and scientific conclusions.
Are you up to the challenge?

Edit: These graphs are preliminary observations. What hypotheses can we construct using these observations, and how can we test them?

In hindsight, here's a hypothesis:

Popularity of science rises due to its ability to explain nature. It attracts a lot of minds who would otherwise have searched for answers in religion. The decline of usage of the word religion and rise of word science can be attributed to that.

Then there is the rise of usage of religion from the 1990's. This may be less due to rise of popularity of religion and more due to increase in literature skeptical of religion and the rebuttals from religious apologists trying to fend off those criticisms.

(14-01-2011 11:59 PM)Lije Wrote:  Then there is the rise of usage of religion from the 1990's. This may be less due to rise of popularity of religion and more due to increase in literature skeptical of religion and the rebuttals from religious apologists trying to fend off those criticisms.

This is the part I find interesting, and I had a similar theory in mind. Religion is taking a lot of heat today, and whereas in the past they were taken for granted as essential and inextricable from culture at large, today there is a huge volume of books that are critical of religion's very reasons for being.


  Science-2010-Bohannon-1600.pdf (Size: 180 KB / Downloads: 4)

In this TED talk, Nicholas Christakis predicts that massive availability of data from social networks will herald the beginning of Computational Social Science, which can revolutionize social sciences like the telescope did astronomy. The Google Ngram viewer seems to be one of the first tools for such a discipline.

Here are some snippets after playing with the Ngram viewer:

1. While playing off Science vs Philosophy (which some say subsumes Science and some others say is rendered superfluous by it), we find that the peaks and troughs in the Science curve occur at nearly the same times as those in the Philosophy curve. Even when the Science curve lies well above the Philosophy curve, they could fit each other like the matching edges of a jigsaw puzzle!


Since we are not limited to plotting only two quantities at a time, we can plot for 'Science', 'Philosophy' and 'Religion' at the same time, and find that the upsurge in Science hasn't affected Philosophy as much as it has Religion.


2. While using the Ngram viewer, we must be careful while using words which are contemporarily loosely treated as synonymous. Consider these:




Perhaps 'humanities' gives such a poor showing because this term gained currency only fairly recently. By the same token, perhaps the word technology too is a comparatively recent coinage.

(continued from previous)

3. Staying with the Science vs Religion playoff, we can see that in the past century, the literary discourse has begun to involve more evidence than faith...


...and society is getting less concerned with sin than the more earthy 'crime'.


In the world of books, for most of history, there have been more 'miracles' than 'happenings'...


...but of late, more events seem to be attributed to Chance than to Providence!