Science News, Articles and Information. Scientific American: Search. Does Oral Sex Confer An Evolutionary Advantage? Evidence From Bats. Regular readers of this blog know that while I think studying animal cognition, behavior, and communication is (sometimes) fun and (always) interesting, the real importance – the why should I care about this – is because by understanding animals, we can attempt to learn more about ourselves.
I’ve written about this before. Here are the relevant excerpts: When human adults show complex, possibly culture-specific skills, they emerge from a set of psychological (and thus neural) mechanisms which have two properties: (1) they evolved early in the timecourse of evolution and are shared with other animals, and, (2) they emerge early in human development, and can be found in infants and children, as well as adults. Three questions necessitate a comparative evolutionary approach (or, minimally, are enriched by such an approach): (1) Is a given trait unique to humans?
(2) Does the acquisition of a given trait depend on uniquely human abilities? Figure 1: Okay, maybe one Batman joke. New Technology, Science News, The Future Now. INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos. Priest says Sen. Santiago deserves the ‘fires of hell’ MANILA, Philippines—She may be untouchable in the Senate, but before the eyes of God, Senator Miriam Santiago is liable to “the fires of hell,” a Roman Catholic priest said Saturday.
Decrying the senator’s court antics at Mass on Saturday, Fr. Catalino Arevalo, the spiritual adviser of the late former president Corazon Aquino, said Santiago should apologize publicly for repeatedly berating prosecutors at the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona. “If you call anybody ‘You fool,’ you are worthy of the fires of hell. And she called them ‘gago,’ which is Filipino for fool, before millions of people,” Arevalo said in his first Saturday homily at the Edsa Shrine at noon. “I did not say that.
His tone emphatic, Arevalo repeated his message to the senator without mentioning her name. “Well, that was before millions of people. “That’s the teaching of Jesus. Consequentialism FAQ. The Consequentalism FAQ (Formatted Answers and Questions) Table of Contents 0: Introduction1: Whirlwind Metaethics2: Morality Must Live in the World3: Assign Value to Other People4: In Which We Finally Get to Consequentialism5: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number6: Rules and Heuristics7: Problems and Objections8: Why it Matters 0.1: Who are you?
Where am I? You can find more about me at www.raikoth.net. 0.2: So what's all this then? Consequentialism is a moral theory, i.e. a description of what morality means and how to solve moral problems. I do not claim full credit for the insights expressed in here. 0.3: Why? The basic thesis is that consequentialism is the only system which both satisfies our moral intuition that morality should make a difference to the real world, and that we should care about other people. 0.4: And who cares?
Part Eight will get into this further, but the basic summary is: we live in a failed world.