Comments on: What a Brazilian monkey tells us about the rockets’ red glare

By: Highlights from True/Slant

Highlights from True/Slant — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:55:11 +0000

[...] What a Brazilian monkey tells us about the rockets’ red glare [...]

By: Jeff McMahon

Jeff McMahon — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:42:11 +0000

Rocky, thank you so much for your perspective. I also think these thoughts are obvious, yet scientists keep rediscovering them, and every day people act out the same drama, not only dividing into teams but relishing the division and all the forms of murder that follow from it, with almost no one ever seeming to make an effort to escape the gravity of the process. I also think we’re hard wired to destroy, and probably will never learn to stop, but I didn’t think that way 20 years ago, and certainly there’s as much wisdom in the idealism of youth as there is in the cynicism of weary years.

By: rockyinlaw

rockyinlaw — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:44:26 +0000

Mr McMahon — I’m staring at your article as if it were something from a bygone era. I must be really old. Your observations IMO are not unwelcome, but they are so, well, obvious. On the other hand, what you are not saying is enormous. For one example, don’t you think that to eliminate the “ingroup-outgroup bias”—evident not only in the international examples you give, but also in our own country’s conservative vs progressive antagonisms and intolerance—one has also to consider cutting world population by about 75%? That an ever increasing consumption of resources, whether to subsist or to squander, has turned on the gene for war and there’s nothing going to stop it, not even these big primate brains of ours that know for a fact that unless we do stop it, we are heading for our own comeuppance?