Interesting

From an article by David Eagleman in The Atlantic about our brain chemistry:

MANY OF US like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a charitable idea, but demonstrably wrong. People’s brains are vastly different.

Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don’t affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.

And this feeds into a larger lesson of biology: we are not the ones steering the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and an egg granted us certain attributes and not others. Who we can be starts with our molecular blueprints—a series of alien codes written in invisibly small strings of acids—well before we have anything to do with it. Each of us is, in part, a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.



This article, when coupled with the imminent cultural critic Ali G goes on to highlight one the main theories I've been a proponent of for years, which is that women, excluding German women who are cold, should be in charge of every major nation in the world because we'd have way less violence. Or, at least according to this statistic we would. Anyhow, I'm probably going to train up lil s like a ninja of politics so she can be the first ever female emperor of the universe, and I'll teach her to crush anyone who opposes her. This might defeat the purpose, but I'm still pretty excited about it. Mainly the crushing part.

Tonight, as I was getting s ready for bed, I pulled the computer towards her and mildly crushed her hand in the process. She slowly pulled it away and started crying. Then, after a few seconds she leaned forward and started wildly bashing on the computer. "Sometimes the things and people that hurt us the most are also the ones we love the most," I told her, but she was busy learning to type.


He had started working on the picture well before she died. This was not technically true. His mother had had a premonition of his wife’s death months before she actually passed. By that point in time though he had decided that his mother could no longer be trusted. This was a commonly held opinion for men in that time.

His wife had died in an accident involving a hunting party. And this really, now that he stopped to consider it, holding his pencil above the page and gazing pensively out the window in the posture of someone stopping and thinking or perhaps daydreaming, lips a bit dry and cracked but no matter, proved that his mother was a bit of a fraud. She, his mother, had claimed that Lydia’s death was going to come about due to something that he said. And when questioned further, just to be sure because one can never be certain, she said that it didn’t have to do with an actual murder or anything, rather, just his voice, something he said. He hadn’t said a word to her on the day she’d been killed in the hunting accident.

The whites had brought them guns two years ago before they sailed away to their distant shores, and hunting, a purely English past time had briefly consumed the village. And it was during one of these hunts, they really didn’t have much to hunt for, just a couple of flightless birds, which, when you came right down to it, were rather pathetic. However, it was on one of these hunts that his wife had been shot. In fact, he thought, etching the left side of her mouth, which had been slightly asymmetrical with a piece of charcoal, he hadn’t even approved of the hunt or given her any sort of verbal affirmation. She had been a strong headed woman.

The sun seems to be at no angle. It just sits directly overhead beating down on the hut where he is working on a picture of his dead wife. It was the botanist among the Europeans who had first taught him to draw. It was a proclivity that his fellow islanders found a bit odd as they were often out thieving or surfing or trying to sleep with women. They could not see the point of sitting alone in a room bent over a piece of animal skin with charcoal. The general consensus was that such an activity was characteristic of the white man, and a rather great waste of both a man’s time and energy. In the end, what fun was it to look at a picture?