MORALS ARE BIOLOGICAL IN NATURE

In the current NEWSWEEK (Nov. 28, 2005) a review of the contemporary situation of “evolution” in American culture is covered in an article titled, “Evolution of a Scientist” about Darwin and his ideas. Of course, the title is misleading in that “evolution” is not “change” like a change in Darwin’s thoughts or life values. Evolution describes a particular relational process between genetic traits and environmental niches that lead to morphological alterations in species which eventually lead to new species arising in the course of evolutionary time.

Francis Collins (director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian) is quoted in the piece: “... in my view the moral law itself defies a purely biological explanation.” He must be a Bush appointee because moral law can quite easily be shown to be a biological quirk. Just read the book, THE MORAL ANIMAL, by Robert Wright, and you will see that morality has arisen from our monkey roots.

Along this very line of thought, I wrote an essay awhile back for the Spokesman Review in an attempt to get it published on the “Faith and Values” page of their Saturday edition. I’ve never heard back from them. So, not to let my effort go to waste, I’m including it in my blog here below:

WHAT’S A VALUE? by George Thomas

It’s easy, isn’t it, for men and women to lord it over one another with values? How often in history have majority values been forced upon minorities by ridicule, torture and death camps? Who can forget the Inquisition, or the fascist devaluing of homosexuals, Gypsies, Communists and Jews so they could be eliminated? Serious business, this evaluating one another, yet very few of us take the time to seriously consider the nature of values—what it means to evaluate one another, how some human notions come to acquire value while others don’t. What is a value after all?

First we must agree that values don’t exist unless they’re put into action. To say we value something is easy enough, but values remain empty potentials until acted upon. Hypocrisy is born from values contradicted by actions. In so many behaviors we’re hypocrites and most frequently hypocrites when we’re busily mouthing platitudes.

It may come as a shock to hear that dogs have values. What I mean to say is that dogs act upon value systems just like humans do. They can’t talk about their values and probably aren’t consciously aware of them, except as emotional discomforts or physical impulses, but dogs do act upon their emotional evaluations of situations. Imagine a very hungry dog smells food, but near the food lurks a predator who enjoys dog meat. The dog must choose between meat and being meat. He must overcome his fear and go eat dinner or he must catch a Greyhound out of there. What he chooses to do is what he values most (or feels most urgently) at that moment—his hunger or his fear.

As far as research can show, dogs aren’t conscious they reveal values when they act. Assigning value to animal behavior requires human consciousness. Born of an evolved capacity for language and guided by human feeling, the human brain strives mightily to evaluate the Universe which it only recently became conscious of, perhaps 40,000 years ago during the Great Leap Forward. Human brains assign value to all things, great and small. We recognize our values in animals because we experience our values the same way dogs do—through our actions. Am I implying that human values are emotion-driven behaviors which we employ in order to make ourselves feel safer? Well....

When we hook humans up to wires and scan their brains, we find the human brain is an ever shifting energy field, altered constantly by storms of electrical impulses that arrive incessantly from the senses. The brain, mostly unconscious of the chemical storm, reacts its way through that storm, tipping toward and away from action, seeking a chemical balance or level of comfort. And it really isn’t much aware of what it’s doing. No central command center where decisions are made appears in human brain scans, just flashing synapses and chemical stirrings that result in human activity and thoughts about activity.

Human values, that is, our feelings about reality, are wired in the brain’s limbic system into everything we do and think. The human brain is constantly feeling (i.e. valuing) its way through a mental representation of the outside world that the senses present to it toward mental states which make the human animal feel safe and away from those that frighten it. Values are the chemistry of our emotions revealed through action.

Yes—scientific observation does suggest that when we closely monitor brain activity, we discover a brain chemistry which facilitates the need by humans to regulate their social contacts with one another so they can feel safe. People value what makes them feel good and devalue what makes them feel unsafe. People feel real pain when they suffer injustice and real comfort when life goes smoothly. We name that comforting chemical stasis in people’s brains their “sense of justice” (i.e. values confirmed).

Theists seek to empower their values by projecting their feelings about reality onto some greater authority above them, much like we project values onto our animal companions below. Theists seek to lend authority to their values in order to increase their control over others and over their environment, thus enhancing their sense of physical safety. They can’t be blamed for playing the survival game that brain chemistry dictates. And atheists aren’t above that either; they also require cultural rules for survival and share most of the social values which enhance survival for theists. Atheists just recognize that human values arise from human biological imperatives rather than from spiritual commandments from on high.

SEEING RED. THIS CAME IN ON THE INTERNET.

Dear Red States:

We're ticked off at the way you've treated us and we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.

In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast.

We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches.

We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and antiwar, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your citizens. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you
don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home.

We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Oil Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners), 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy League and Seven Sister schools, plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists,
virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Sincerely,
The Blue People


PECKING ORDER PHOTO OPS

A recent article in NEWSWEEK reports on the current trend by high school graduates to get "fashion-model-style photos" for graduation. Photographers spend hours shooting the young "models" in all sorts of poses and dressed in many ways, i.e. in football togs or swim wear or stripped to the waist (males), sitting on horses and tractors, or seducing their favorite poor person. One mother will spend $700 dollars on these wasteful shots. The poor need not apply. Another mother reports that she's sure glade they no longer need to wear the monotonous blazers. Some schools are sensible enough to require more basic shots for school yearbooks, but the proud and the rich will be sure to lord it over the less fortunate with their selections of posed and polished snapshots for exchange. Parents, parents—when will you call a halt and cut down on these needless high school expenses which only spoil your children? But, of course, evolutionary theory would suggest that if you got it, you flaunt it. Prestige (pecking order) is a necessary animal trait. Somehow, this article makes me think of "The Last Picture Show" or "Midnight Cowboy".

ACTION WITHOUT ATTACHMENT? AH, NO. . . .

I get great amusement out of all these calls to transcendent action, whether Christian or Buddhist, calls to action with noble purpose or so clear of my humanity as to be devoid of purpose. How can any action be free of purpose since it must take place with the body's purpose even if only the purposes of the body to pee and to poop? For I am but a man, with the weakness of the frail, human man, and the unquenchable desires born of my biological nature. Philosophy and religion are always trying to make us poor humans commit ourselves to a pie in the sky dream of behavior.

Sounds hopeless to some, I imagine, yet, I think we do have a chance to clean up our acts, but we shall never clean them up until we cast aside morality and begin to consider the science of behavior. When we can ask and answer, "Is selfishness a moral dilemma or a scientific problem," then we can finally start to get to the bottom of my bottom and the breast of her breast.

[OPEN QUOTE] "Indeed, the BHAGAVAD GITA itself, as a chapter of this warrior epic [MAHABHARATA], is in aim and content a lecture of encouragement to a young prince afflicted with a qualm of conscience before giving the signal of battle, to free his mind from all sense of grief and guilt in killing. 'For that which is born, death is certain,' he is told; 'and for that which is dead, birth is certain. You should not grieve over the unavoidable.... The Supreme Self, which dwells in all bodies, can never be slain.' 'Weapons cut it not; fire burns it not; water wets it not; the wind does not wither it. Eternal, universal, unchanging, unmovable, the Self is the same forever.'

"'... Dwelling in all bodies, the Self can never be slain. Therefore you should not grieve for any creature.'

"And that, in sum, is the ultimate ground, in Oriental thinking, of all peace. In the field of action—which is to say, in life—there is no peace, and there can never be. The formula, then, for the attainment of peace is to act, as one must, but without attachment. 'Being established in yoga;' the young warrior prince Arjuna of the GITA is taught, 'perform your actions, casting off attachment and remaining even-minded, both in success and in failure. This evenness is what is called yoga. And far inferior is mere action to action performed with this evenness of mind. Seek refuge in this evenness. Wretched are all who work for results. Endued with evenness of mind, one casts off in this very life both good deeds and evil deeds. Strive, therefore, for yoga. Yoga is skill in action.'" [CLOSE QUOTE]

(from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Campbell, pp. 201-02)


HOW ART THOU SUBTLE, O, GENDER BIAS

from HOUSE OF CARDS by Robyn Dawes, p. 104:

"A colleague of mine in medical decision making tells of an investigation he was asked to make by the dean of a large and prestigious medical school to try to determine why it was unsuccessful in recruiting female students. My colleague studied the problem statistically “from the outside” and identified a major source of the problem. One of the older professors had cut back on his practice to devote time to interviewing applicants to the school. He assessed such characteristics as “emotional maturity,” “seriousness of interest in medicine,” and “neuroticism.” Whenever he interviewed an unmarried female applicant, he concluded she was “immature.” When he interviewed a married one, he concluded she was “not sufficiently interested in medicine,” and when he interviewed a divorced one, he concluded she was “neurotic.” Not many women were positively evaluated on these dimensions, which of course had nothing to do with gender."


COMING CLEAN

I got this out of my current NEWSWEEK: "I'm the one who presented it to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It is painful now." —Colin Powell telling Babara Walters how he feels after giving the 2003 speech to the UN which pursuaded many countries to support America's invasion of Iraq.

He's an outcast now, in the Republican Party and among decent people of the world. Persons with integrity ought to stay away from the fascisti in the Republican/fundamentalist Party. Come on over, Colin, and join the Democrats or Independents or Greens. We know just how you're feeling. The Republican Party is a real ripe smelling bunch of bad fish, and you should break free of them.
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"The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again." —George Miller

HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE; THEN AND NOW

The following is from Donald Spoto's biography of Ingrid Bergman, NOTORIOUS. The backlash against Hollywood by current prudish Christians sounds just as crazy and loud now as it did then. Over and over, at least throughout modern history, artists and intellectuals are always the target of religious prudes. This is because prudes fear and hate the internal freedoms which creative people almost always display. Of course, "creative people" does not include the John Waynes and Charlton Hestons of the acting world because they usually demonstrate little talent save for playing to a type. John Wayne got his only Oscar by playing against type. And Stalone got good reviews for playing a cowardly cop in "Copland" recently.

[OPEN QUOTE] That year, Hollywood folks were already under the worst cloud of suspicion in the history of the business. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was on the rampage, tearing up the lives of filmmakers, writers, actors and even arts professors in a search to root out the specter of Communism among "dangerous" artists and intellectuals. If traitorous Americans were not exposed (so ran the conventional wisdom), then Russians would creep into the house while decent Americans slept, and suddenly the country would be under the control of the Soviets. The traitors were probably already embarking on a plan to atomize the minds of innocent Americans: according to a very active (and misguided) citizens' group, the numbing of America was to be achieved when Communists got their way and put fluoride in the nation's water supply.

The paranoia that gripped postwar America had several causes. First of all, China had fallen to a Communist regime in 1949. That same year, Moscow announced the detonation of an atomic bomb. Communist troops were preparing for a war (beginning in 1950) against American-supported armies in Korea. And there were, alas, some authentic cases of treason and espionage on the home front. All these fueled a terrible suspicion among ordinary people.

The triumph over Fascism in Europe and the hitherto unimaginable display of power demonstrated by America's atomic bombs at the end of World War II bestowed, in their wake, an unspoken presumption that there was something like a divine mandate to protect everything "pure" about American values and American success. In June 1949, peace and prosperity were proofs of that. A certain moral smugness often occurs in such circumstances, the odd but unspoken hunch that God is an American. Thus the coagulation of pride and paranoia.

It all began in October 1947, when the HUAC, which had developed unchecked from a congressional committee to investigate suspicious activities among American intellectuals, acted more and more like medieval Crusaders. Nineteen prominent men in Hollywood were ordered to testify about their involvement in Communist activities. The first group (who came to be known as the "Hollywood Ten") at first refused to testify and at once lost their jobs, were sentenced to prison and fined for contempt of Congress. (1) Studio executives initially condemned the witch hunt, but when threatened with the loss of financial backing from East Coast banks, they became friends of the HUAC. The deepest loyalties of moguls are always to the cashier. Hence, too, the hypocrisy over the box office receipts of Stromboli.

In short order, those suspected of having Communist associations—or who might even have belonged to intellectual groups critical of society in the 1930s—were blacklisted unless they cooperated with HUAC. The result was that those who did not, who included some of Hollywood's finest talents, never worked there again or were forced to take a long leave of absence. At the same time, during a writers' strike, studios fired all employees who refused to toe the mark by cooperating with the HUAC.

All this reached critical mass with the rise of the disreputable Senator Joseph McCarthy, a forty-year old Wisconsin Republican who was about to launch one of the worst assaults against American constitutional rights in the nation's history. Almost single-handedly' McCarthy—with the loud support of millions—expanded the Hollywood witch hunt, claiming he had the names of known Communists who were working in the highest government offices. The "lists" of these names he never produced, nor could he ever provide a convincing case against a single individual. Nevertheless, capitalizing on the country's anxieties about Korea and Eastern Europe, Mccarthy raged on, trampling civil liberties in the name of patriotism.

McCarthy was finally disgraced in 1954 after his lunacy led him to attack (of all people) President Eisenhower as tainted with Communist sympathies. But by the time the Senate finally censured him, McCarthy's fantasies had ruined countless lives and helped to canonize a dangerous ideal of extreme right-wing conformity—a notion that was itself anomalous in a nation born in revolution, raised on healthy dissent and encouraged on a diet of rugged individualism.

Senators McCarthy and Johnson and their species had talked a lot about God blessing their undertakings, and they were mighty sure where those undertakings led and where they were being corrupted. In the entertainment industry, one of their staunchest supporters was Walter Winchell, whose reports to "Mr. and Mrs. America" approved the blacklisting of actors, writers and technicians in radio and television.

Thus the country was hot with both rage and fear regarding Hollywood people. No writer, producer or actor who wanted to work dared to submit a story that was even vaguely critical of something gone wrong in the nation, nor would he or she dare to imply that the culture was increasingly blanketed by paranoid delusions. An appallingly narrow, conservative smog darkened the entire landscape of the entertainment industry just when Ingrid Bergman fell in love and became pregnant.

For many Americans, movie actors were strange, immoral, no account scoundrels. Newspapers had recounted the antics of Lana Turner, Charles Chaplin, Mickey Rooney and Errol Flynn. Movie stars, as Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell implied on the radio, were not always nice people. Sometimes they drank too much and got arrested; they had extravagant homes and wild parties; worst of all, they seemed to get divorced and remarried as often as normal folks have birthdays. Ingrid Bergman was held above all that—until now. "People saw me in Joan of Arc and declared me a saint," Ingrid said. "I'm not. I'm just a woman, another human being." Well, that was no excuse. The Puritan public disgrace heaped upon her was so virulent that it is remarkable that she was not close to a nervous breakdown.
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(1) The Hollywood Ten: screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo; and directors Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytryk. [CLOSE QUOTE]

YOU MIGHT BE AN IMMATURE CHIMP, OR... ANOTHER REASON NOT TO GET TOO BIG FOR YOUR GENES!

I’m including the following quotation for a bit of a laugh and to suggest some possible reading.

Lucy filled out

“Chimpanzees really could have passed through a more humanoid, bipedal stage before reverting to quadrupedal apehood. As it happens, this very suggestion has been revived by John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas, in their two books, The Monkey Puzzle and The First Chimpanzee. They go so far as to suggest that chimpanzees are descended from gracile australopithecines (like Lucy), and gorillas from robust australopithecines (like 'Dear Boy'). For such an in-your-face radical suggestion, they make a surprisingly good case. It centres on an interpretation of human evolution which has long been widely accepted, although not without controversy: people are juvenile apes who have become sexually mature. Or, putting it another way, we are like chimpanzees who have never grown up.

“The Axolotl's Tale explains the theory, which is known as neoteny. To summarise, the axolotl is an overgrown larva, a tadpole with sex organs. In a classic experiment by Vilem Laudberger in Germany, hormone injections persuaded an axolotl to grow into a fully adult salamander of a species that nobody had ever seen. More famously in the English-speaking world, Julian Huxley later repeated the experiment, not knowing it had already been done. In the evolution of the axolotl, the adult stage had been chopped off the end of the life cycle. Under the influence of experimentally injected hormone, the axolotl finally grew up, and an adult salamander was recreated, presumably never before seen. The missing last stage of the life cycle was restored.

“The lesson was not lost on Julian's younger brother, the novelist Aldous Huxley. His After Many a Summer was one of my favourite novels when I was a teenager. It is about a rich man, Jo Stoyte, who resembles William Randolph Hearst and collects objets d'art with the same voracious indifference. His strict religious upbringing has left him with a terror of death, and he employs and equips a brilliant but cynical biologist, Dr Sigismund Obispo, to research how to prolong life in general and Jo Stoyte's life in particular. Jeremy Pordage, a (very) British scholar, has been hired to catalogue some eighteenth-century manuscripts recently acquired as a job lot for Mr. Stoyte's library. In an old diary kept by the Fifth Earl of Gonister, Jeremy makes a sensational discovery which he imparts to Dr Obispo. The old Earl was hot on the trail of everlasting life (you have to eat raw fish guts), and there is no evidence that he ever died. Obispo takes the increasingly fretful Stoyte to England in quest of the Fifth Earl's remains . . . and finds him still alive at 200. The catch is that he has finally matured from the juvenile ape which all the rest of us are into a fully adult ape: quadrupedal, hairy, repellent, urinating on the floor while humming a grotesquely distorted vestige of a Mozart aria. The diabolical Dr Obispo, beside himself with gleeful laughter and evidently acquainted with Julian Huxley's work, tells Stoyte he can start on the fish guts tomorrow.

“Gribbin and Cherfas are in effect suggesting that modern chimpanzees and gorillas are like the Earl of Gonister. They are humans (or australopithecines, orrorins or sahelanthropes) who have grown up and become quadrupedal apes again, like their, and our, more distant ancestors.” 

—Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR’S TALE, pp. 98-99
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"It's relaxing to go out with an ex wife because she already knows I'm an idiot." —Warren Thomas (No relation to me.)

STELLA! HEY, STELLA!

The beginning of one production of Tennessee Williams' play, "Streetcar Named Desire", opens with Stanley, the protagonist, entering and throwing a package of bloody meat on Stella's, his wife's, lap. Thus Stanley brings home the meat. To think of Tennessee Williams and his home base in New Orleans and of that play set in New Orleans, makes my heart ache. I once rode a streetcar name Desire while I was living on the West Bank across from the The Big Easy just to say that I had done it. Read below and you'll understand why I opened this Dawkin's entry as I did. Lots of interesting theorizing.

"Even if this is an exaggeration, it should at least encourage us to look elsewhere for possible benefits of our unusual gait. It arouses the suspicion that, whatever non-locomotor benefits of bipedality we might propose as drivers of its evolution, they probably did not have to fight against strong locomotor costs.

"What might a non-locomotor benefit look like? A stimulating suggestion is the sexual selection theory of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, of the University of Oregon. She thinks we rose on our hind legs as a means of showing off our penises. Those of us that have penises, that is. Females, in her view, were doing it for the opposite reason: concealing their genitals which, in primates, are more prominently displayed on all fours. This is an appealing idea but I don't carry a torch for it. I mention it only as an example of the kind of thing I mean by a non-locomotor theory. As with so many of these theories, we are left wondering why it would apply to our lineage and not to other apes or monkeys.

"A different set of theories stresses the freeing of the hands as the really important advantage of bipedality. Perhaps we rose on our hind legs, not because that is a good way of getting about, but because of what we were then able to do with our hands—carry food, for instance. Many apes and monkeys feed on plant matter that is widely available but not particularly rich or concentrated, so you must eat as you go, more or less continuously like a cow. Other kinds of food such as meat or large underground tubers are harder to acquire but, when you do find them, they are valuable—worth carrying home in greater quantity than you can eat. When a leopard makes a kill, the first thing it normally does is drag it up a tree and hang it over a branch, where it will be relatively safe from marauding scavengers and can be revisited for meals. The leopard uses its powerful jaws to hold the carcass, needing all four legs to climb the tree. Having much smaller and weaker jaws than a leopard, did our ancestors benefit from the skill of waLking on two legs because it freed their hands for carrying food—perhaps back to a mate or children, or to trade favours with other companions, or to keep in a larder for future needs?

"Incidentally the latter two possibilities may be closer to each other than they appear. The idea (I attribute this inspired way of expressing it to Steven Pinker) is that before the invention of the freezer the best larder for meat was a companion's belly. How so? The meat itself is no longer available, of course, but the goodwill it buys is safe in long-term storage in a companion's brain. Your companion will remember the favour and repay it when fortunes are reversed. (1) Chimpanzees are known to share meat for favours. In historic times, this kind of i.o.u. became tokenized as money.

"A particular version of the 'carrying food home' theory is that of the American anthropologist Owen Lovejoy. He suggests that females would often have been hampered in their foraging by nursing infants, therefore unable to travel far and wide looking for food. The consequent poor nutrition and poor milk production would have delayed weaning. Suckling females are infertile. Any male who feeds a nursing female accelerates the weaning of her current child and brings her into receptiveness earlier. When this happens, she might make her receptiveness especially available to the male whose provisioning accelerated it. So, a male who can bring lots of food home might gain a direct reproductive advantage over a rival male who just eats where he finds. Hence the evolution of bipedalism to free the hands for carrying. —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 91-92
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"(1) There is a well-developed theory of reciprocal altruism in Darwinism...." p. 92 footnote


WALKING AROUND TO GET A LITTLE SEX

How many nights in my life did I walk around and around, suffering over the loss of one woman or another? Are we sure that walking didn’t arise as a stress release mechanism for horny males? Richard Dawkins tells other tales, but the most interesting thing about bipedalism is that it’s the one trait which separates us "superior" humans from all other mammals. Not tool using as once opined. Birds and chimps and other beasts also use tools.

DON'T GET TOO BIG FOR YOUR BRITCHES—I MEAN—GENES;
WE'RE JUST SO MUCH GOODWILL CLOTHING TO GENES.

"But of course all species have family trees. All species inherit genetic material. All species with two sexes have an Adam and an Eve. Genes and gene trees are an ubiquitous feature of life on Earth. The techniques that we apply to recent human history can also be applied to the rest of life.

"Cheetah DNA reveals a 12,000-year-old population bottleneck important to feline conservationists. Maize DNA has stamped upon it the unmistakable signature of its 9,000-year Mexican domestication. The coalescence patterns of HIV strains can be used by epidemiologists and medical doctors to understand and contain the virus. Genes and gene trees reveal the history of the flora and fauna of Europe: the vast migrations driven by ice ages whose waxing pushed temperate species into southern-European refuges, and whose waning stranded Arctic species on isolated mountain ranges. All these events and more can be traced in the distribution of DNA around the globe, a historical reference book which we are only just learning to read.

"We have seen how different genes have different stories to tell, which can be pieced together to reveal something of our history, both modern and ancient. How ancient? Amazingly, our oldest MRCA [Most Rccent Common Ancestor] genes can even date back before we were human at all. This is especially so when natural selection favors variety in the population for its own sake. Here's how it works.

"Suppose there are two blood types called A and B, which confer immunity to different diseases. Each blood type is susceptible to the disease against which the other type has immunity. Diseases flourish when the blood type that they can attack is abundant, because an epidemic can get going. So if B people, say, happen to be common in the population, the disease that hurts them will enjoy an epidemic. Consequently, B people will die until they cease to be common, and the A people increase—and vice versa. Whenever we have two types, the rarer of which is favored because it is rare, it is a recipe for polymorphism: the positive maintenance of variety for variety's sake. The ABO blood group system is a famous polymorphism which has probably been maintained for this kind of reason.

"Some polymorphisms can be quite stable—so stable that they span the change from an ancestral to a descendant species. Astonishingly, our ABO polymorphism is present in chimpanzees. It could be that we and chimps have independently 'invented' the polymorphism, and for the same reason. But it is more plausible that we have both inherited it from our shared ancestor, and independently kept it going during our six milIion years of separate descent, because the relevant diseases have been continuously at large throughout that time. This is called trans-specific polymorphism, and it may apply to far more distant cousins than chimpanzees are to us.

"A stunning conclusion is that, for particular genes, you are more closely related to some chimpanzees than to some humans. And I am closer to some chimpanzees than to you (or to 'your' chimpanzees). Humans as a species, as well as humans as individuals, are temporary vessels containing a mix of genes from different sources. Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history. This is a tree-based way to express the central message of The Selfish Gene, my first book. As I put it there, 'When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.' " —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 59-61

HERE'S ALMOST A COMPLETE SHORT CHAPTER BY DAWKINS

I'm really excited by a chapter like this one, entitled "The Cro-Magnon's Tale", by the brilliant Richard Dawkins. I think language is important in the development of consciousness and, thus, art and literature, and since I have degrees in the arts, language arts, this piece of writing rings bells for me. Can this be when the brain reached a magnitude of wrinkle, or surface, so that a "meme" could find a hotel in the brain from which to visit and make sales pitches to other brains?

"ARCHAEOLOGY SUGGESTS that something very special began to happen to our species around 40,000 years ago. Anatomically, our ancestors who lived before this watershed date were the same as those who came later. Humans sampled earlier than the watershed would be no more different from us than they were from their own contemporaries in other parts of the world, or indeed than we are from our contemporaries. That's if you look at their anatomy. If you look at their culture, there is a huge difference. Of course there are also huge differences between the cultures of different peoples across the world today, and probably then too. But this wasn't true if we go back much more than 40,000 years. Something happened then—many archaeologists regard it as sudden enough to be called an 'event'. I like Jared Diamond's name for it, the Great Leap Forward.

"Earlier than the Great Leap Forward, man-made artifacts had hardly changed for a million years. The ones that survive for us are almost entirely stone tools and weapons, quite crudely shaped. Doubtless wood (or, in Asia, bamboo) was a more frequently worked material, but wooden relics don't easily survive. As far as we can tell, there were no paintings, no carvings, no figurines, no grave goods, no ornamentation. After the Leap, all these things suddenly appear in the archaeological record, together with musical instruments such as bone flutes, and it wasn't long before stunning creations like the Lascaux Cave murals were created by Cro-Magnon people. A disinterested observer taking the long view from another planet might see our modern culture, with its computers, supersonic planes and space exploration, as an afterthought to the Great Leap Forward. On the very long geological time scale, all our modern achievements, from the Sistine Chapel to Special Relativity, from the Goldberg Variations to the Goldbach Conjecture, could be seen as almost contemporaneous with the Venus of Willendorf and the Lascaux Caves, all part of the same cultural revolution, all part of the blooming cultural upsurge that succeeded the long Lower Paleolithic stagnation. Actually I'm not sure that our extra-planetary observer's uniformitarian view would stand up to much searching analysis, but it could be at least briefly defended.

"David Lewis-Williams's The Mind in the Cave considers the whole question of Upper Paleolithic cave art, and what it can tell us about the flowering of consciousness in Homo sapiens.

"Some authorities are so impressed by the Great Leap Forward that they think it coincided with the origin of language. What else, they ask, could account for such a sudden change? It is not as silly as it sounds to suggest that language arose suddenly. Nobody thinks writing goes back more than a few thousand years, and everyone agrees that brain anatomy didn't change to coincide with anything so recent as the invention of writing. In theory, speech could be another example of the same thing. Nevertheless, my hunch, supported by the authority of linguists such as Steven Pinker, is that language is older than the Leap. We'll come back to the point a million years further into the past, when our pilgrimage reaches Homo ergaster (erectus).

"If not language itself, perhaps the Great Leap Forward coincided with the sudden discovery of what we might call a new software technique: maybe a new trick of grammar, such as the conditional clause, which, at a stroke, would have enabled 'what if' imagination to flower. Or maybe early language, before the leap, could be used to talk only about things that were there, on the scene. Perhaps some forgotten genius realized the possibility of using words referentially as tokens of things that were not immediately present. It is the difference between 'That waterhole which we can both see' and 'Suppose there was a waterhole the other side of the hill' Or perhaps representational art, which is all but unknown in the archaeological record before the Leap, was the bridge to referential language. Perhaps people learned to draw bison, before they learned to talk about bison that were not immediately visible." —Richard Dawkins in THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 35-36
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"There is no stronger bond of friendship than a mutual enemy." —Frankfort Moore (The more I consider this, the more I realize it's false, unless, of course, you're a conservative in the mold of the likes of Bush, Rove, Cheney and Perle. Moore must have been a conservative.)

WHO'S THE MEANEST S.O.B. OF ALL?

George Will in a recent "Last Word" in NEWSWEEK came as close to agreeing with me and I with him in the paragraph below:

"Politics is a distinctively human activity, but it arises from something not distinctively human—from anxiety about security, and fear of violent death. On the firm foundation of this brute fact, Thomas Hobbes erected a political philosophy that last week reacquired urgent pertinence.

"In 1651 in 'Leviathan', Hobbes said that in 'the state of nature,' meaning in absence of a civil society sustained by government, mankind's natural sociability, if any, is so tenuous that life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.' Thoughtful conservatives—meaning those whose conservatism arises from reflections deeper than an aversion to high marginal tax rates—are conservative because they understand how thin and perishable is the crust of civilization, and hence how always near society's surface are the molten passions that must be checked by force when they cannot be tamed by socialization." (NEWSWEEK, Sept. 12)

Steven Pinker, the excellent biologist, in his book, THE BLANK SLATE, also espouses similar views to Will's, noting that liberals' "utopian ideals" are not as realistic as conservatives' "tragic views" of humankind. He goes on to support his views with tons of evidence from the hard sciences which study human beings and animals and conclusively demonstrate that humans are selfish to the quick by nature.

If anything, liberals and conservatives ought to be able to meet at some juncture here. If we need government in order to restrain human excesses and "brutishness", then we both agree that government is necessary to the health and welfare of human beings. So, we shouldn't be about shrinking government. There's an inconsistency here in the attempts by conservatives to attack big government when they ought to see the necessity of it.

The only difference between our views is that conservatives tend to think we ought to use government to regulate and control humans while liberals want to use government to make life better for human beings. And when I say "better" I don't mean by the imposition of religious moral values on each other, but by aiding all citizens through educational and economic policies to do the very best they can. Punishment and control by government ought to be the last concern, after other investments have failed. This is at root, the difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives wish to change society through control/punishment and liberals through coercion/reward.

(PS: Guys like Bush aren't conservatives; they're really anarchists; they want small government so that the strongest among us can dominate the weaker among us. Bush is too stupid to know what he really is.)


JUST ANOTHER INTERESTING STORY FROM MY READING

The following is another example of how science works as compared to how religion has worked in the past. Though the conclusion about an impact on the Moon is not confirmed, notice how Sagan sifts the evidence and note that Sagan does not claim anymore for his finding than is called for: "may" is all Sagan claims is possible. Note also that the monk, Gervase, reports "fire, hot coals and sparks" as described by the five monks while the historical record reports "burned at the stake" for the visionary Roman Catholic scholar, Giordano Bruno."

[Open quote] The actual impact ot a small comet or asteroid with the Moon might make a momentary explosion sufficiently bright to be visible from the Earth. ...there is an historical account which may in fact describe an impact on the Moon seen from Earth with the naked eye: On the evening of June 25, 1178, five British monks reported something extraordinary which was later recorded in the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury, generally considered a reliable reporter on the political and cultural events of his time, after he had interviewed the witnesses who asserted, under oath, the truth of their story. The chronicle reads:

'There was a bright New Moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted towards the east. Suddenly, the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out fire, hot coals, and sparks.'

The astronomers Derral Mulholland and Odile Calame have calculated that a lunar impact would produce a dust cloud rising off the surface of the Moon with an appearance corresponding rather closely to the report of the Canterbury monks.

If such an impact were made only 800 years ago, the crater should still be visible. Erosion on the Moon is so inefficient, because of the absence of air and water, that even small craters a few billion years old are still comparatively well preserved. From the description recorded by Gervase, it is possible to pinpoint the sector of the Moon to which the observations refer. Impacts produce rays, linear trails of fine powder spewed out during the explosion. Such rays are associated with the very youngest craters on the Moon—for example, those named after Aristarchus and Copernicus and Kepler. But while the craters may withstand erosion on the Moon, the rays, being exceptionally thin, do not. As time goes on, even the arrival of micrometeorites—fine dust from space—stirs up and covers over the rays, and they gradually disappear. Thus rays are a signature of a recent impact.

The meteoriticist Jack Hartung has pointed out that a very recent, very fresh-looking small crater with a prominent ray system lies exactly in the region of the Moon referred to by the Canterbury monks. It is called Giordano Bruno after the sixteenth century Roman Catholic scholar who held that there are an infinity of worlds and that many are inhabited. For this and other crimes he was burned at the stake in the year 1600. [Close quote] (Sagan's COSMOS, pp. 85-86)
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"It's okay to laugh in the bedroom so long as you don't point." —Will Durst

WHY ARE SOCIALISTS BETTER AT FREEDOM THAN CHRISTIANS?

The following is from the gay newspaper, STONEWALL (August 2005). The Spanish have got Zapatero and we've got Bush. But we can thank Bush for putting Zapatero into power, can't we?

[Open quote] Translated by Rex Wockner

When the Spanish parliament took its historic vote legalizing both gay marriage and adoption of children by gay couples [June 30], Socialist Prime Minister Jose' Luis Rodriguez Zapatero—who put the full prestige of his office and party behind passage of the gay human rights legislation—made perhaps the most remarkable speech in favor of full equality for those with same-sex hearts ever delivered by a head of government anywhere.

Here are excerpts from Zapatero's speech:

"We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families. At the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

"In the poem 'The Family,' our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because,

'How does man live in denial in vain
by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?'

"Today the Spanish society answers to a group of people who, during many years, have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied and their liberty oppressed. Today the Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity and restores their liberty.

"It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone's triumph. It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet, because it is the triumph of liberty. Their victory makes all of us, even those who oppose the law, better people; it makes our society better. Honorable members, there is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married. To the contrary, what happens is, this class of Spanish citizens gets the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: This law enhances and respects marriage.

"Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in a profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.

"With the approval of this bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them that many years ago our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives. Today we can offer them a beautiful lesson: Every right gained, each access to liberty the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our recognition and praise.

"Today Prime Minister Jose we demonstrate with this bill that societies can better themselves and can cross barriers and create tolerance by putting a stop to the unhappiness and humiliation of some of our citizens. Today, for many of our countrymen, comes the day predicted by Kavafis [the great Greek gay poet] one century ago:

'Later 'twas said of the most perfect society
someone else, made like me
certainly will come out and act freely.' " [Close quote]

That's from Spain, a once upon a time Empire, and we're in America, the home of democracy and freedom. What's wrong with this picture under American fundamentalism?


ANOTHER OF MY LETTERS TO THE EDITOR—UNPUBLISHED YET

When one looks at today’s world, an obvious reality emerges. The world is roughly divided between nations dominated by angry religious factions and those which aren’t. Nations run by religious remain scientifically, politically, economically backward. Fewer democracies exist among them, and women are more often oppressed. Poverty runs rampant in fundamentalist religious nations, and civil liberties are most threatened in them. Many backward religious nations are led by dictators.

Far too many evangelicals strive to impose this foreign, religious angst on America. Generally, they oppose science and change, make bad economic decisions (Bush’s deficit), are warlike, argumentative, angry. They seek to control how we act in our bedrooms, what we do with our bodies, what we read and watch, who we should love and marry. They try to tell us when we should have and with whom we should raise children. They’re basically a negative force, awaiting their imaginary rapture/escape.

We can’t afford to let fundamentalism halt American progress. We must move forward scientifically, politically, economically. Let evangelicals pray freely (it’s America) but vote them from political power. Historically, religious fundamentalists always abuse political power. They’re oppressive because all god/myths are tyrannical by nature, demanding obedience or death.

CUTE, LIKE A FOX

Can evolution happen this fast? Read below from Dawkins' THE ANCESTOR'S TALE:

[Open quote] Some idea of the accidental genetic consequences of domestication is given by some interesting Russian work on silver foxes.

D. K. Belyaev and his colleagues took captive silver foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and set out systematically to breed for tameness. They succeeded, dramatically. By mating together the tamest individuals of each generation, Belyaev had, within 20 years, produced foxes that behaved like Border collies, actively seeking human company and wagging their tails when approached. That is not very surprising, although the speed with which it happened may be. Less expected were the by-products of selection for tameness. These genetically tamed foxes not only behaved like collies, they looked like collies. They grew black-and-white coats, with white face patches and muzzles. Instead of the characteristic pricked ears of a wild fox, they developed 'lovable' floppy ears. Their reproductive hormone balance changed, and they assumed the habit of breeding all the year round instead of in a breeding season. Probably associated with their lowered aggression, they were found to contain higher levels of the neurally active chemical serotonin. It took only 20 years to turn foxes into 'dogs' by artificial selection.* [Close quote] —R. Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 29-30

By the way, all dogs come from wolves, not foxes. But imagine how quickly the morphology of these foxes changed with the change of one trait. How long before a new species would appear, one which could not breed with other foxes?


HONESTLY, IT WAS AN HONEST MISTAKE!

"It is only a theoretical ideal that repetitive copying retains perfect accuracy. In practice scribes are fallible, and not above massaging their copy to make it say things that they think (no doubt sincerely) the original document ought to have said. The most famous example of this, painstakingly documented by nineteenth-century German theologians, is the doctoring of New Testament history to make it conform to Old Testament prophecies. The scribes concerned were probably not wilfully mendacious. Like the gospel-makers, who themselves lived long after Jesus's death [the earliest 2 to 3 generations after], they genuinely believed he had been the incarnation of Old Testament messianic prophecies. He must, therefore, have been born in Bethlehem, and descended from David. If the documents unaccountably failed to say so, it was the scribe's conscientious duty to rectify the deficiency. A sufficiently devout scribe would, I suppose, no more have regarded this as falsification than we do when we automatically correct a spelling mistake or a grammatical infelicity." —also THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 19


IT MAKES EVOLUTION GO BERSERKLY FINE

"... one day, quite by accident, a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself, using as building blocks, other molecules in the soup. . . . This was the earliest ancestor of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, the master molecule of life on Earth. It is shaped like a ladder twisted into a helix, the rungs available in four different molecular parts, which constitute the four letters of the genetic code. These rungs, called nucleotides, spell out the hereditary instructions for making a given organism. Every lifeform on Earth has a different set of instructions, written out in essentially the same language. The reason organisms are different is the differences in their nucleic acid instructions. A mutation is a change in a nucleotide, copied in the next generation, which breeds true. Since mutations are random nucleotide changes, most of them are harmful or lethal, coding into existence nonfunctional enzymes. It is a long wait before a mutation makes an organism work better. And yet it is that improbable event, a small beneficial mutation in a nucleotide a ten-millionth of a centimeter across, that makes evolution go." —from COSMOS, Carl Sagan, pp. 30-31

Sagan on comets: "It seemed inconceivable that a spectacular streak of milk-white flame, rising and setting with the stars night after night, was not there for a reason, did not hold some portent for human affairs. So the idea arose that comets were harbingers of disaster, auguries of divine wrath—that they foretold the deaths of princes, the fall of kingdoms. The Babylonians thought that comets were celestial beards. The Greeks thought of flowing hair, the Arabs of flaming swords. In Ptolemy's time comets were elaborately classified as "beams," "trumpets," "jars" and so on, according to their shapes." —Carl Sagan's COSMOS, p. 78

Is modern fundamentalist thinking about natural events much different than the way the ancients thought about comets? That's a question to consider when we start evaluating modern fundamentalism's claims as it tries to impose supernatural explanations onto natural events like evolution and the Big Bang. I can't see any difference. They're that many years behind in their thinking. Too much Bible believing has retarded their mental functions.

AN AFTERNOON IN THE PARK WITH STUDS TERKEL / NOSTALGIA

Studs was there in 1968 when the Democratic Convention was a happenin'! Somehow the conclusion to this tiny passage of writing forced me to break out in a loud laugh. Studs caught something here.

[Open quote] The humiliating attributes of tear gas are astonishing. During the Grant Park fracas, one day later, the gas floated across the boulevard and affected casual passersby. Among them were two Chicago industrialists, one of whom I recognized as an admirer of Richard J. Daley. From inside the bar at the Conrad Hilton, I saw him coughing, crying, and angrily waving away his companion, who sought to comfort him. It was a remarkable dumb show: a powerful man, powerless and humiliated by something he could not quite put his hand on.

We are stumbling, helter-skelter, across the park, toward Clark Street. It is a retreat of stumblebums. James Cameron and I, among others whose presence we hardly sense, are two characters out of Samuel Beckett. We are Estragon and Vladimir. We are Hamm and Clov. We are Krapp. We cling to one another. We cough, we spit, we hawk, we curse. Like blind Pozzo, we stumble on.

A canister falls at our feet. A tall young man, of flowing blond beard (I note, tearfully), immediately behind us, kicks the canister away, toward himself. "Are you all right? Are you all right?" he coughs at us, solicitously. "Grrrhhgg," we reply. "Are you sure?" "Grrrhhgg," we insist. [Close quote]

I've only experience tear gas, myself, in boot camp when we had to don masks and stand in a shed to be gassed. Then we were told to remove our masks and to experience the gas firsthand. It became a test of wills between some of us to see who could withstand the pain longest. My memory tells me I won, but who can trust his memory? Anyway, the drill instructor made some of us come out before we harmed ourselves.


GOD LIES! WHAT?!

"It would seem that God lied and the serpent told the truth. Initially, God ordered Adam not to eat from The Tree of Knowledge, telling him that he would die on the very day that he did so. Yet, later, after eating from the fruit of this tree, Adam not only lived (for about nine hundred years), but God feared that he would obtain eternal life if he ate from the Tree of Life and it became necessary to expel him from the Garden." —Gary Greenberg, p. 51, 101 MYTHS OF THE BIBLE

Here's another consideration. Why did God need a "Tree of Life"? Did he have to eat from it in order to get his own eternal life? Were there greater beings than God who gave him the tree so that he could be eternal? Or was the tree a lie he made up to tease Adam? Why keep the tree in the Garden where Adam could get at it? Was God some sort of tempter, worse than the snake? In fact was God the snake all along who created God as a cover? I hate to say this, but only someone who is stupid as a brick or unhinged could believe any of this nonsense. Does it scare you to think that more than fifty percent of Americans believe Genesis to be true stuff?


THIS MAKES CREATIONISM A MENTAL FOSSIL

"In spite of the fascination of fossils, it is surprising how much we would still know about our evolutionary past without them. If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about 'gaps' in the fossil record. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both." —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 13

I'm just beginning this book and set two others aside in mid-read so that I could run to this one. It was burning a hole on my shelf. I'm so excited!

FELLINI TO CARLO TO TERKEL BY CHANCE

[Open quote.] December 1962. It is toward the end of the day. Fellini is weary as hell. He has been dubbing "8 1/2".

"Rome happens to be where I live and work. That the squalid city depicted should find its historian not in a Suetonius or Tacitus but in a gossip columnist seems right to me. [says Fellini, speaking of his movie 'La Dolce Vita'] Concerning the unmerciful look at each scene: everything is seen through the same curious, negative eye. This way of looking seemed typical of our time: a tragic or a great event is given the same importance as the election of a beauty queen; all are given the same value."

Fellini's English isn't bad, but he'd rather say it in Italian. My Bolognese friend, Carlo Baldi, is our interpreter. He is a marvel, but on occasion he engages in poetic flights. "For Chrissake, Carlo, give it to me literally." Carlo smiles. I don't understand. "Studs, my dear friend, Federico Fellini is a poet. To translate as you suggest might lose its flavor." Aahhh, what can I say to that? He's Italian.

I am haunted by Fellini's being haunted by the waste of human beings, of possibilities that may never be tapped.

"Actually, I am very optimistic about human beings. I do not feel I have adopted a negative, judging attitude toward human waste. This wandering around today in search of some truth has a certain value, I feel, and I view it with a sympathetic eye. This sympathy, this solidarity, this participation in everything we do, I attempt to express formally in my work."

Now give it to me straight, Carlo, I say to the party of the third part. Oh God, Carlo, I silently pray, don't be Montale or Ungaretti now, give me Fellini straight. And Carlo does just that (I think) beautifully.

"Decay can bring liberation and growth. Men tend to become free through it. The hero of "81/2"—the movie director Guido—out of the decay of doubts and confusions, recognizes himself. Only by admitting that decay can he start fresh, free of doubts given him by wrong education, and free, too, of the way of life imposed on him by his environment. By admitting them, Guido is free to start all over again. He finds a new humanity.

"I try to reveal a certain element in all of us and to vibrate a core in our spirit. I am concerned not only with social implications; I care for the poetry in us.

"Guido becomes aware of the value of man as he is. Man's recognition of his limitations is a way to freedom. Only when man understands that he is free can he know where he stands and then make a free choice. Only at this point can he jump into faith. This faith can be religious, political, or whatever. That choice exists is the point." [Close quote.]

And here am I, 43 years after this discussion between Studs Terkel (alive) and Federico (dead), and only just now discovering that maybe humans have very little freedom at all because of our entrapping genes which decide for us so many of our human traits and abilities, yet, for all that, I have this sense, also expressed by Fellini, that the more I accept the fact that I might be a robot after all, the more free I imagine I am. I'll take that sense of freedom if that's all I can have. It's just like I can see that there's no god, yet I do admit that the "idea of god" works for some people to lessen their pain when they suffer a loss. However, I don't know if that's true either. Pain is pain.

Also, about this idea of choice, how free am I to choose? I can see that when I first read Daniel Dennett's CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED, I set off on a course of reading about consciousness and into the subject of evolutionary psychology, but what led me to pick up Dennett's book five or so years ago? How did that appear on my radar screen, and, then, what tipped me to pick up the book after it appeared on the radar scope? Each choice, if I honestly consider it, was based on previous experiences which primed my chemical system in the brain to lean one way or another when I encountered the phenomena about which I had to make what we call a "choice". I think of choice as being a chemical potentiality in the brain which causes me to tip this way or that at each moment of "decision". Then, of course, my consciousness, wholly unaware of the brain's chemical command over it, names the event, "choice", after the fact.

I believe that's true. Not as philosophically deep as the discussion by Dennett in his book, FREEDOM EVOLVES, but close enough for farm machinery.
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"It's better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life." —Irish proverb