“The question of evil and where it lurks has been largely ignored by the scientific community, which is why a recently released study titled ‘The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins Within Nevada‘ is groundbreaking: Never before has a state’s fall from grace been so precisely graphed and plotted. Geographers from Kansas State University have used certain statistical measurements to quantify Nevada’s sins and come up with a county-by-county map purporting to show various degrees of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride in the Silver State. By culling statistics from nationwide databanks of things like sexually transmitted disease infection rates (lust) or killings per capita (wrath), the researchers came up with a sin index. This is a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data. Their findings were presented Tuesday at the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting at the Riviera, where Kansas State geography research associate Thomas Vought fielded questions while standing next to a poster of his research. Seven maps of Nevada, in seven different colors, for seven different sins. The darker a county, the more evil it is…. Lust was calculated by compiling the number of sexually transmitted diseases — HIV, AIDS, syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea — reported per capita… The Kansas geographers started this project, it seems pretty clear, for the erudite amusement; something to stand out at a 6,000-person convention consumed with the world’s heavy questions. But if Tuesday’s convention crowd was evidence, the sin study was interesting to other scholars as well. So Vought and colleagues plan to continue their national study of evil.” — Las Vegas Sun (US)

Let’s be clear that this “national study of evil” was conducted with tongue firmly in cheek. The abstract states that the study was prompted in no small part by the fact that the AAG’s annual convention was being held in “Sin City” itself, Las Vegas. And the study’s brilliant title — “The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins by County within the United States” — parodies other “spatial analyses” and “spatial distributions” presented at the conference.

With that in mind, it’s probably wrong to make too much of the science used to calculate the density of sins in America. Here is the lust map. It visualizes the STDs per capita. Obviously that is not a rigorous way of calculating lust, since it may say less about sexual desire than about healthcare, education, wealth, climate, and so forth. After all, if “the darker a county, the more evil it is,” are we really supposed to believe that a few pockets of Mississippi and South Dakota are among the lustiest counties in the land? If Vegas is Sin City, is South Dakota Sin Country?

What would really be interesting would be to set aside these vague notions of “sin” and develop more objective maps of the spatial distribution of deviant behaviors. It’s entirely doable. For example, a pervy geographer could map all the reported arrests for sexual deviance that occur during a certain period of time. How many bestiality cases occur in a year — five or ten? How many necrophilia cases — five? How many pedophilia cases — several thousand? Where do they occur? Are some counties pervier than others? What revelations about sexual behavior might be inspired by a kink-minded mashup of Google News and Google Maps?

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