Would you like to listen to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens discussing religion for two hours? My initial impulse was that I wasn’t especially interested, even though I admire these thinkers/writers and I agree with many of their ideas. My hesitation was that I was already…
In the January 31, 2008 edition of Nature, author Dan Jones reviews what evolution indicates about human killing humans. As with many human behaviors, the evolutionists divide on whether killing of other humans is an adaptation (a change in organisms that allows them to live more successfully in an environment) or a “byproduct of urges toward some other goal.” There are intriguing arguments for both sides.
Some have suggested that individual murder is more likely a byproduct, whereas organized violence (such as the type we see in wars) is more often an adaptation. What is the biological evidence pointing to something other than byproduct? A 1997 study found that “the average volume of the orbitofrontal cortex between men and women accounts for about half of the variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes.” Combine this with Jane Goodall’s observations of gang violence in chimpanzees, where “the adult males of one community systematically attacked and killed the males of another group over a period of years, with the victorious group eventually absorbing the remaining victims.”
It is incredibly hard to weed out the cultural factors from the biological, of course. Here’s something I found interesting. Interpersonal attacks leading to death have declined dramatically over the past few centuries.
…After rising from an average of 32 homicides per 100,000 people per year in the 13th and 14th centuries to 41 in the 15th, the murder rate has steadily dropped in every subsequent century, 21.9, 11, 3.2, 2.6 and finally 1.4 in
The answer is we don’t know.
I don’t know. You don’t know. No one knows. That’s it. Off with you . . . [I figured that this title would draw some Bible-toting fundies to the site].
So you can all leave now. There’s nothing here to discuss. Go visit some other blog post. Have a nice long life, because at the end of your life, you’ll likely just be dead. You know, you’ll be
blooey, breathless, buried, cadaverous, checked out, cold, cut off, deceased, defunct, departed, done for, erased, expired, extinct, gone, inanimate, inert, late, lifeless, liquidated, mortified, no more, not existing, offed, passed away, perished, reposing, rubbed out, snuffed out, spiritless, stiff, unanimated, washed up and wasted.
There is no reason to think that any dead person has ever been aware of anything at all.
I’ll admit that it is possible that at the moment you die, your consciousness will continue. Maybe you’ll instantly be transported to the far side of the moon to ride a sparkly majestic merry-go-round after you’re dead, but there’s no evidence for that or any other version of continued sentience. The only evidence is that when you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s nothing more we can say about it. There’s no credible report that anyone has returned from the dead to say otherwise. You didn’t listen; I said “credible.”
. . . Oh, I see some of you are still hanging around because you can’t accept “I don’t know” for an answer. I …
Are they gone? Are all the millions of people who take Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone-who-are-not-severely-depressed gone? Good. Now we can talk. The rest of you have probably already read the news that:
Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said Tuesday.
Why would the news media ever report the truth regarding these wildly-hyped antidepressants? After all, scientists have long known that most of the power of these drugs is in the placebo effect. Or, at least, scientists should have suspected this, because the FDA was refusing to release the full data sets regarding these drugs trial, at least until the good scientists who work on this new report (Prof Irving Kirsch and colleagues) requested “the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.” Gosh, it appears that some of the relevant data wasn’t available to the forty million people taking these drugs, until long after the release of these drugs through massive corporate guerilla marketing.
In its advertisements, the manufacturer of Prozac, Lilly, doesn’t say anything about the drug not working well for large numbers of the patients for whom it was being prescribed. In fact, Lilly makes this claim:
…The safety and effectiveness of PROZAC have been thoroughly studied in clinical trials with more than 11,000 patients. There have been more than
I often notice left-handedness, perhaps because I am a left-hander. A few days ago, while watching a video of the most recent Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama debate, I noticed that Barack Obama was left-handed (he was taking notes with his left hand). That video reminded me that Bill Clinton was also…