RE: LIMITS TO BRAINS

-----Original Message-----
Behalf Of Boris Stremlin

>mechanism which transforms genes into mind) by demanding that Till
>publish refutations to every article that he (Hanson) has ever read.

I really like this.  More examples on point.  Real world facts are altered
to preserve existing dogma. (I did not, in fact, say what Boris is claiming
I said).  This then is the human animal: reject the real world in favor of
social fantasies.  You are in good company Boris, we have a long history of
it:

"… wherein it is set forth that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus, that
the Earth moves around the Sun and that the Sun is stationary in the center
of the world and does not move from east to west, is contrary to the Holy
Scriptures and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we
have written and subscribed these presents with our hand this twenty-sixth
day of May, 1616." -- Robertro Cardinal Bellarmino

"Of all hatreds, there is none greater than that of ignorance against
knowledge." Galileo Galilei, June 30, 1616

We can see now that Galileo didn't have it quite right.  It's not knowledge
itself that people hate (e.g., people are dying to find out whether George
Jr. snorted coke), it's physical world knowledge that threatens social
constructions of reality that people really hate.  People are born that way:

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Consider first a phenomenon I call the deontic effect in human reasoning
(Cummins, 1996b, 1996c). Deontic reasoning is reasoning about rights and
obligations; that is, reasoning about what one is permitted, obligated, or
forbidden to do (Hilpinen, 1981; Manktelow & Over, 1991). Deontic reasoning
contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what is true
or false. When reasoning about deontic rules (social norms), humans
spontaneously adopt a violation-detection strategy: They look for cheaters
or rule-breakers. In contrast, when reasoning about the truth status of
statements about the world, they spontaneously adopt a confirmation-seeking
strategy. This effect is apparent in the reasoning of children as young as
three years of age (Cummins, 1996a; Harris & Nuñez, 1996) and has been
observed in literally hundreds of experiments on adult reasoning over the
course of nearly thirty years, making it one of the most reliable effects in
the psychological literature (see Cummins, 1996b, 1996c, and Oaksford &
Chapter, 1996 for reviews of this literature).
[pp. 39, 40, THE EVOLUTION OF MIND, 1998, Oxford ]

Jay