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What would the consciousness dabblers or evolutionary biologists here recommend for the latest books on the evolution of morality? Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds and Richard Joyce’s Evolution of Morality appear two of the more recommended books, is there anything else that is a must-have?

Dr. Helen is amused by a fellow forensic psychologist with a poor grasp of history:

Perhaps Dr. Schlesinger has a poor memory, because if she thought about it, she would know that the famous song by the BoomTown Rats entitled, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was written about “non-existent” (at least to some experts) Brenda Spencer. Spencer was a seventeen-year-old high school senior in San Diego who in January of 1979 opened fire into a crowded elementary school across the street from her home.

Because women tend to do things rather differently than men, people sometimes errantly conclude that they don’t do them at all. Given how many deaths take place in hospitals, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that more people are killed by murderous nurses every year than by angry school and workplace shooters.

Of course, a quiet injection every now and then doesn’t create quite as much noise in the media.

ZT may be waiting a long, long time:

I already bought Wrath of Angels from amazon but would rather buy from you if you had it direct some place. Might actually get it faster as well as it seems to be on back order at Amazon.

You’d better cancel that order, ZT, since Pocket won’t be providing Amazon with Wrath anytime soon. Or ever, as far as I know, since I reclaimed the rights from them after they sat on it longer than the contract allowed. If you’d like to read it in material form, I strongly suggest buying it here since that’s the only place you can do so. As for those of you who are waiting on the second run, the books have shipped from the printers so they should be going out relatively soon.

Police make lousy soldiers. Soldiers make lousy policemen. And a militarized police force is counterproductive regardless of whether you want to keep the peace or win a war:

There’s a telling scene related to all of this in Evan Wright’s terrific book Generation Kill. Wright was embedded with an elite U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. Throughout his time with the unit, Wright documents the extraordinary precautions the unit takes to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, and the real heartbreak the soldiers feel when they do inadvertently kill a civilian. About 3/4 through the book, Wright explains how the full-time Marines were getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their civilians lives were law enforcement, “from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals,” and were acting like idiot renegades. Wright quotes a gunnery sargeant who traveled with the reserve unit:

Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They’d roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop…He’s like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him ‘Napoleon.'”

The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who’d been helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi troops.

Yeah, there’s a group of idiots you want to arm and send out on nightly no-knock raids so they can bravely kill 92-year old women in their homes.

Anyhow, it’s good to see that these lying murderers are no longer “protecting and serving”.

It’s no wonder that feminists aren’t so keen on evolutionary biology:

Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then expel it. “It only makes sense as a barrier,” she said.

To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced matings. “To me, it means these females are successful with this strategy,” she said.

Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. “The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus,” she said.

This is scientific evidence which clearly suggests the vast majority of men are not inclined to commit rape, given most men’s lack of longer, more flexible phalluses and the apparent absence of corkscrew vaginas among women. It does raise some interesting questions about two old stereotypes, of course, given the historical supposition that gentlemen of African descent possessed larger phalluses as well as lower inhibitions against forced matings.

Having spent no time in intimate relations with any gentlemen of African descent, forced or voluntary, I cannot testify to the truth or fiction of the old stereotype, but it would be interesting to know if there is less rape in Japan, home to the famous “rice-penis”, than in a nation wherein the men are demonstrably more well-endowed.

Or, of course, where the women are shaped like corkscrews.

Given this new avian research, I suppose we must conclude that the only evolutionarily accurate explanation for the singular attribute of the White Buffalo is that his ancestors made a regular habit of forced matings every weekday and twice on Sundays.

Anyhow, the thought of the operation of Natural Selection entertwined with morality-related actions such as involuntary intercourse got me thinking about the common claim that human morals evolved over time. If this is true, there should be some sort of moral fossile record which can be tracked over the centuries, even as civilization has itself evolved. But what little I’ve seen of this fossile record of morality tends to demonstrate precisely the opposite… especially when taking into account how fast our current socially dictated mores have changed over the last fifty years.

Take the notion of sexual chastity being a moral virtue. According to some, this is no longer true. Nor was it true in most pagan cultures, so at what point did it evolve and and what point did it become an evolutionary dead-end?

These are questions that must be answered, and answered in some degree of detail, if we are to accept the model of evolving morals. But not only has the model not yet been proven in any way, I’m not aware of it even having been articulated to any significant degree.

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. But it’s nice to see that there’s at least one company that actually listens to its users:

You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

It was a nice touch putting in the HD-DVD crack into the post title as well. Anyhow, this concept of a site owner being responsible in any way for information that other people put on it has got to go. It’s exactly like prosecuting the owner of a building for a hate crime because someone else spray-painted a swastika on it.

The “crime” is non-existent and the party being held liable isn’t responsible.

I found this to be more than a little amusing:

By the age of 19, 80% of US males and 75% of women have lost their virginity, and 87% of college students have had sex. But this number appears to be much lower at elite (i.e. more intelligent) colleges. According to the article, only 56% of Princeton undergraduates have had intercourse. At Harvard 59% of the undergraduates are non-virgins, and at MIT, only a slight majority, 51%, have had intercourse. Further, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex.

The student surveys at MIT and Wellesley also compared virginity by academic major. The chart for Wellesley displayed below shows that 0% of studio art majors were virgins, but 72% of biology majors were virgins, and 83% of biochem and math majors were virgins! Similarly, at MIT 20% of ‘humanities’ majors were virgins, but 73% of biology majors.

I don’t know if you can really blame the graduates at elite East Coast universities for not having sex. I visited more than a few of them during my college years with the track team and I can honestly say that with the exception of Dartmouth, you could count the number of attractive women at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown and other similar schools on one hand… and leave out your thumb. For a Minnesota boy accustomed to being literally surrounded on every side* by slender, pretty, Scandinavian blondes with blue eyes, these road trips always reminded me of Dante’s journey into the various circles of Hell.

Based on other correlations between atheism and college major, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that a primary cause of evangelical atheism – as opposed to mere skepticism or a personal lack of belief in a deity – is sexual frustration.

But highly intelligent people do tend to be creatures of extremes. Most of the very intelligent women that I knew at university were not sexually active, but a substantial percentage of those that were tended to fall in the “sexual freak” category.

I note that believing that an action is sinful is no basis for concluding that the believer will not engage in the sinful behavior. The Christian belief clearly states that ALL are fallen, including the believer, which is the very reason for Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and the need to repent. And as numerous Christians have pointed out, if sin wasn’t fun, there wouldn’t be any need to preach against it.

On a tangential note, Cosmos earlier asked why some people believed prostitution was immoral. This is either a tremendously ignorant question or a misplaced one. The reason is that prostitution is a clear violation of the Biblical commandment to avoid fornication… and the Scripture even contains specific warnings to avoid prostitutes. Whether one believes in the holy nature of the Bible and its moral precepts or not, the reason is perfectly clear and has been for centuries.

A better question would have been why people, regardless of their beliefs regarding the immoral nature of prostitution, should oppose its legalization. I note that while I believe prostitution is clearly immoral, it should be legal on the basis of it being a simple service transaction like any other. Given that the Bible does not advocate the banning of prostitutes or a legal punishment for engaging their services, merely the personal avoidance of them, I see no religious justification for the modern legal ban on the time-honored profession.

*Seriously. I mean, the janitor at our Northwest gym looked a lot like Scarlett Johansson and no one ever thought for a second that she was anything out of the ordinary. In fact, she wasn’t even as pretty as the previous janitor.

Karl Rove lets slip a little inside information:

What must Bush make of that? [Karl Rove being an atheist]

I think it’s false to say that the president acts as if he believes he has God’s instructions. Compared to Jimmy Carter, he’s nowhere. He’s a Methodist, having joined his wife’s church in the end. He also claims that Jesus got him off the demon drink. He doesn’t believe it. His wife said, “If you don’t stop, I’m leaving and I’m taking the kids.” You can say that you got help from Jesus if you want, but that’s just a polite way of putting it in Texas.

I never trust any so-called Christian who prefers to refer to Christ instead of Jesus or Jesus Christ. I was certain that Bush was a complete fraud once I heard his answer about his favorite philosopher being “Christ”.

Brent also makes some good points about the difference between atheism the unbelief and atheism the ur-religion. He’s absolutely correct, regarding both the distinction between the two and his apparent distrust of the latter.

Mitt Romney gives every literate American a much better reason to avoid voting for him:

When asked his favorite novel in an interview shown yesterday on the Fox News Channel, Mitt Romney pointed to “Battlefield Earth,” a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. That book was turned into a film by John Travolta, a Scientologist.

A spokesman said later it was one of Mr. Romney’s favorite novels.

“I’m not in favor of his religion by any means,” Mr. Romney, a Mormon, said. “But he wrote a book called ‘Battlefield Earth’ that was a very fun science-fiction book.

Being an avid reader of science fiction, I picked up a copy of Battlefield Earth at the library in junior high. I was pretty excited, since it was an absolutely massive tome which meant that it might take me more than two or three days to devour it.

It was not fun, it was bad. It was beyond bad. It was so horrifically awful that it remains to this day one of the very few novels that I have never finished reading. When sitting on various Nebula juries, one finds oneself in the position of having to read some impressively bad stuff, but in all my years, I have only once read a science fiction novel that was worse than Battlefield Earth.

This little glimpse into what passes for the mind of Mitt romney demonstrates, like few other things could, that Romney is the lightest of the various lightweights in the running for the Republican nomination. On the other hand, he does have Executive Hair, so at least he’d look good delivering his lines.

One is forced to conclude that there is no substantial difference between the requirements for a news anchor and a president. This bodes well for Fred Thompson, his resemblance to an amphibian notwithstanding, although my view is that we should cut to the chase and elect Christopher Walken.

At least the presidential press conferences and State of the Union addresses would be worth watching.

UPDATE – Mr. Regression to the Mean doesn’t seem to realize what this statement says about his own fitness to write opinion columns:

These questions to politicians about their favorite books are ridiculous. It takes time to read books, and time is something politicians don’t have. It’s more revealing to ask them what movies they like.

Well, at least we’ve put to rest the old, pernicious Platonic idea of the Philosopher-King.

I have no doubt that they don’t want to publish any names:

As the so-called “D.C. Madam” case unfolds in the nation’s capital, with alleged prostitution ringleader Jeane Palfrey claiming a list of thousands of prominent clients, Washington-area editors say they are following the story, but remain reluctant to print such a list, were it available, without serious scrutiny.

While they have no problem destroying reputations belonging to commoners, the Washington media is significantly more circumspect about soiling those belonging to the bi-factional ruling party. This media-political complex is much more interested in protecting its own than in reporting the truth or even making money.

After all, a little silence at just the right time can be worth a lot more than a scoop or two.