It turns out that if you begin an assertion with “it turns out” and sprinkle it with statistics and acronyms—especially if it’s expressed in the passive voice and followed by a footnote—up to 83 percent of the variation in whether people buy it is explained by their SCI (science credulity index) and 78 percent by their BDS (baloney detection score). 1 Here’s how it works. “It turns out,” writes Dalton Conley, the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology at Princeton, in his new book The Social Genome , “that almost every trait that has been studied is at least partially influenced” by genetic differences, including “about 40 percent” of the variation in how far people advance in school. “For income,” he continues, “it’s 70 percent.…