Marat

Many features of mental disorders are common to a number of different psychiatric illnesses. For example, hypervigilance is found in both post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia, so it is important to look at the whole clinical picture. But more importantly, there are certain classical symptoms of schizophrenia which are striking in this case. Auditory hallucinations in which the patient imagines that his own private thoughts are being broadcast to the world or that someone else's thoughts are being inserted into his head just shout 'schizophrenia' to anyone trying to make a diagnosis of this case at a distance. Symptoms like this are not characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder.

It is also interesting to note that national average protein consumption correlates with national rates of renal disease. Those with mild renal impairment can slow the progress of their disease to total renal failure by restricting protein intake, but most people aren't aware of their renal status unless they have their glomerular filtration rate tested. The bottom line is that if you are going to go on a protein eating binge to bulk up on muscle, have your renal function checked first to be safe. Also, the fastest route to muscle building is to ensure that your testosterone level is normal, so testing that and correcting any deficiencies is useful.

I think a key concept here is that of risk. All activities anyone ever performs, other than alone in a locked bunker, create some risk for other people. The risks which are unacceptable, objectively harmful, or such as to cause alarm and disapproval are just those which go beyond the social norm of the basic mutual risk pool we all tolerate. Thus we all accept that driving together on the same road with the same posted speed limits creates a risk, but the risk is not viewed as criminal or harmful because it does not exceed the socially and conventionally determine threshold for the risk we all share in common. It is to highlight this distinction that I gave the example of children participating in dangerous figure skating lessons. True, one could argue as you do, that we should eliminate all dangers -- whether those of religion, sport, or sex -- from the environment of children as abusive and as marks of a previous and less civilized era. But the risks which we accept because we regard them, by convention, are those below the threshold of the common risk pool. Now since young children taking moderately physically dangerous skating lessons, or taking moderately psychiatrically harmful relgious instruction, has always been regarded as below the threshold of 'excessive risk' which the society is willing to endure without complaint, then if we see that risks of physical and psychiatric harm which are intrinsically less than those of skating lessons or religious instruction are forbidden as unacceptable 'risks' by society, we can see that this determination is arbitrary and arises more from society's neurosis about sex than from any objectively neutral assessment of whether the risk of harm is within the ambit of generally tolerated social risk for children. Now of course in our present society the psychiatric risk of sex between adults and children is enormous, but that seems to be just because society arbitrarily chooses to make a huge issue out of it, rather than because in some precultural sense it is intrinsically harmful. If we made that big an issue out of children and adults eating peanut butter together, I am sure that doing so would make children neurotic for life. If we strip away the explosive term, sex, so as to improve our chances of getting at the neutral reality behind it, what we have in sexual relations between adults and children is a mutual sharing of physical pleasure which may be more of an indulgence in curiosity for the children and more of an intense pleasure for the adults. But what is it about the fact that the adults are older, experience a different kind of pleasure, or are more interested in the experience than the children which necessarily creates such a 'monstrous harm' for the younger partners? If an adult gastronom were sharing a cordon bleu meal with a child, no doubt the experience would be infinitely more intense for the adult, but why would that gulf in sophistication, interest, and motivation necessarily be harmful?

But before you can put human intelligence into a subordinate position so that the limitations of its inferential capacity no longer become problems with the lack of evidence to prove something, but instead become problems of a small intellect being unable to understand the superior design of a Higher Being, you have to have the Higher Being to generate that perspective of inferiority for human intellect. But unless you have already adopted the religious perspective, you cannot put the human inability to prove the case for all the evil of the world being ultimately good into question by asserting the REAL possibility that the superior wisdom of some Higher Being may know that it is ultimately good. You can at most say that you can imagine some connection of things which would show that all the evil in the world ultimately turns out to be for the good, but you cannot establish the case for your argument as solidly as the empirical evidence and the logical inference from it establishes the opposing argument. Saying that there could possibly be a causal connection of things we cannot yet see or make sense of by which all the evil in the world could be excused is no different from my imagining that there exists something equally elusive to sense or causal logic which I call 'Marat's Truth-Fairy,' which is an omnipotent being which guarantees that everything I write is true. Your inability to prove that it is impossible that that being exists would not leave open a real possibility that my Truth-Fairy exists, even if I asserted that I could imagine a Truth Fairy which had a superior intellect to human wisdom.

First, I would strongly suspect that the patient is still having problems with schizophrenia, since a psychiatrist previously diagnosed that condition, and it does not really ever go away, though the symptoms can be managed. There is considerable overlap in the characteristic features of psychiatric diagnostic categories, with paranoid features appearing in many types of mental illness, and hallucinations appearing in everything from schizophrenia to severe biopolar illness. However, 'thought broadcasting,' that is, imagining that the unspoken thoughts of other people are broadcast into your mind, is a distinctively schizophrenic symptom, so I would guess that the recent episode is a case in which the underlying and persisting schizophrenic illness was unmasked by the stressful events. Social stress causing the return of previously dormant vocal hallucinations is quite common in schizophrenia.

As I child, I played sex games with other children, but I was never hurt either physically or emotionally by those. The 'risks' involved, if any, seem to have been quite minor in objective terms. But if my parents or the neighbors had discovered us playing those games, they would have been convinced that we had all been damaged for life. This could only be because of an objectively unsupportable value judgment that sex is of no benefit and that sex is a terrible risk. It was well known to my parents, to other parents, to figure skating teachers, and to figure skating students that figure skating lessons, with their many and varied dangerous jumps, were extremely risky and likely to cause physical injury. The high-pressure atmosphere of the childhood figure skating world was also extremely emotionally dangerous to children, since many were severely traumatized on their imaginary route to the Olympics if they lost some competition or were criticized by the judges for making mistakes on compulsory figures. But both of these severe injuries -- physical as well as psychological -- were dismissed as unimportant on a cultural risk-benefit analysis, since skating was regarded as quite good, for utterly arbitrary cultural reasons, and its associated harms, even though they were inflicted on children as young as six or seven, who often hated their skating lessons, as I did, were dismissed on cultural grounds again as an insignificant part of the necessary 'toughening up' process of socialization, in which children are supposed to learn to get over physical injuries and endure psychological pressures. But why are the comparable risks -- or even objectively less serious risks -- of sexuality in children of the same age regarded as the most horrendous, society-destroying, insanity-inducting terrors of the universe? The only possible explanation must be what we already know to be the case -- society is profoundly neurotic in its attitudes towards human sexuality, and instead of regarding it as a natural pleasure no different in principle from getting or giving a massage, eating a meal, or having a warm bath, it artificially renders it sacred, mysterious, and terrifying, so that it can't think rationally about it. This is why adulteresses are stoned to death in Iran, or children used to be fitted with anti-masturbation belts in 19th century America, or Dr. Kellogg around the same time developed food so anti-nutritious that it was marketed for children as an anti-sex nutrient, or modern society goes into a collective convulsion of hysteria every time a 10-year-old boy touches the underwear of a 7-year-old girl. One route to seeing the issue more objectively and neutrally is to remove the frightening word 'sex' and just classify the activity under the more neutral, generic term of 'physical pleasure.' Now if an adult male and a 10-year-old boy mutually give and receive from each other the physical pleasure of a back massage, we might think that a little strange, but no one would be in a panic about it. But how does that sensation of mutual pleasuring differ qualitatively from that involved in sexuality? Many adults regard massage as a part of sex, so it cannot be very easily divorced from sex, yet in law and morals the difference is enormous in the case of pederasty. If we admit that both massage and sex are forms of mutual physical pleasure which differ not in quality but only in degree, then why does a greater degree of mutual pleasuring necessarily induce instant and lifelong psychologic traumatization in a child, while the lesser degree of mutual pleasuring does not? Is there some point where a massage gradually becomes more sexual and less purely massage-like where the permanent psychological damage to the child suddenly appears? Is this point determined by objective physical and psychological factors, or just by cultural agreement? If cultural agreement is the only way to determine the critical point where we shift from a harmless massage to a mind-destroying sexual act, then we agree that culture is causing the problem, not anything necessarily rooted in the body or in the nature of the mind. While adults may have much more intense feelings about sex than children do, is this difference in the intensity of feelings about some shared activity recognized as a general problem in society? As a child I was forced to come into intimate contact with adults who were total religious fanatics, consumed by hatred of some invisible thing they called the 'Devil,' terrified by some odd abstraction they called 'sin,' obsessed with various rituals they called 'sacred,' but I was totally bewildered by all of this, and I shared none of the intensity the adults were forcing me to participate in along with them. The fact that society knew about this and did not care much about it, while it goes berserk at the idea of children forced into experiences with aduls which are much less intense for them than for the adults, and which are outside of their scope of experience, and which they cannot understand, shows again that all of this concern is in fact culturally, not objectively motivated.

All rights of the Federal and state constitutions can be limited for reasonable purposes, according to levels of scrutiny of the rationality and neutrality of those purposes which have been developed from the 14th Amendment. Thus with respect to freedom of speech, you can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, you cannot libel people, you can't reveal state secrets, you can't incite crimes, and you can't counsel people to commit suicide. To judge whether the Massachusetts anti-bullying law is a constitutional free speech limit, we would have to see the statute. Could you provide a link?

To complete your valuable clarification, Mr. Skeptic, we would have to add Needimprovement's position, as follows: 1. The preponderance of evidence shows that there is no God who is necessarily both omnipotent and perfectly good, since all the ordinary empirical data we can assemble and all the ordinary causal connections we can discern among that data indicate that there is unnecessary evil in the world, which contradicts the God hypothesis. 2. However, we can at least imagine that the apparently unnecessary evil in the world is somehow excused by its being essentially linked to some benevolent outcome or redemptive consequence, and this ability to imagine some presently invisible link which ameliorates this evil suffices to rebut all the empirical evidence and demonstrable logical inference from that evidence which says that the apparent evil cannot be excused. 3. Therefore, the ability to imagine alternatives to the logical inferences arising from the available evidence suffices to neutralize the force of that evidence and those inferences. But this is not really how thinking operates, since my ability to imagine that in some particular case the lights in my room go on because invisible fairies provide a glow from their magic wands would never outweigh my belief that the ordinary evidence of my senses and my logical inference from my senses supports the theory that the lights go on because flipping the switch completes a contact in the electrical circuit which produces the resulting glow.

Immanuel Kant made the good point that if Christians knew for certain that they would go to Heaven after death as a reward for their good deeds, it would be impossible for them to be moral, since they could never distinguish between the purely prudent, self-interested act of doing good things just to get a reward, and doing good things just out of the pure goodness of their heart and their love for their fellow humans. That is why he said that Christians should at most claim to believe that there is a Heaven as a reward for good behavior, but never say that they know that there is. Actually, the idea that there would be a reward for good behavior in life in the Afterworld was a feature of Ancient Egyptian religion: That is the meaning of that famous image in which the ibis-headed god Toth weighs a human heart against a feather, to see whether the person deserved everlasting life after death for being 'light-hearted,' i.e., not having done anything to give him a guilty conscience. Moses and Christ as good Jews would have been astonished to find that their followers today believe in an Afterlife where rewards are given for good behavior, since they would have identified this as an Ancient Egyptian religious doctrine, which was blasphemy to their view of theology, which completely rejected an afterlife. Ironically, since the idea of rewards in the Afterlife for good behavior on Earth has now become the central tenet of modern Christian belief, most people in the West actually believe in Ancient Egyptian religion rather than in its historical offshoots, Judaism and Christianity, which rejected it. This diversion of Christianity from its original idea was due to Greek ideas of the eternal Psyche which were overlayed on Christian teaching as it spread through the Eastern Mediterranean.

The notion that society restricts sex out of concern for the objective risks that sexual intercourse carries is easily disproved by the fact that there was still extreme sexual repression during the era when all known std's were controllable and unwanted pregnancies were quite simply avoided. This period lasted from about 1960 to 1980, when the birth control pill reduced the risk of unwanted pregnancies almost to zero and all the known serious std's, such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and yaws, could easily be taken care of with the available antibiotics. Even now, with most people using condoms for sex, and with the Aids risk having been demonstrated to be quite small among heterosexuals, do the objective risks of sex really justify all the restrictions imposed on it? While it is obvious that a form of selection of the fittest goes on in nature when the queen bee, for example, flies as high as she can during mating in order to ensure that only the strongest males can mate with her, females' restriction of mating opportunities to the 'best' males is now largely pointless, since probably 99.9% of all sex occurs purely for pleasure with all possibilities of reproduction excluded, so there is no need to keep the unhealthy, unsuccessful, or unattractive males at bay. However, making sex into a rare commodity rather than treating it as an abundant natural resource does increase the social power of women greatly, since they can then be important just for how they look or what biological cooperation they can provide, rather than actually having to do the hard work of being truly interesting to gain social status.

Usually American universities require all applicants whose native language is not English to take the TOEFL exam, which is a test of English as a foreign language. Each university then determines what is an adequate score for someone to be eligible to apply. From my experience, many foreign students who have 'passed' the TOEFL exam can hardly communicate at all in English, so the standards are often quite lax. MIT is a highly competitive school to get into, so its TOEFL standard may be quite high. Also, keep in mind that there are thousands of institutions of higher learning around the world, many of which have excellent physics programs, so don't confine your attention to MIT. There are many different concentrations within physics, and the type of physics education you would get at MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, and at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich would all be quite different. So study the course offerings and pick the places to apply which focus on your areas of interest. Finally, I am not sure how the Turkish secondary school system operates, but make sure that you have at least the equivalent of an American high school diploma which will be completed before you begin studies at university. Some foreign universities will require a much higher level of education prior to studies, such as in Germany, for example, where you need about a year of American university studies completed for entrance into the beginning of a German university program. The individual school will often have information about how it converts Turkish qualifications to their application standards.

There is also the problem, closely related to your point, of the cultural sacredness of the female body. One general once crudely answered the question, why women are not allowed in combat roles, by saying "No one wants to see women coming home with their tits shot off." Since it would be disproportionately costly to society's morale in supporting a war to have women crippled by combat visible on the streets, which is always more shocking than men equally damaged by war, that is an important consideration in the argument. However, it all comes down to an issue of balance. Society now values the equality of the sexes so highly that women are allowed to be firefighters, even though there may be a cost to fire safety in permitting this. So some practical costs may be worth accepting to promote female equality by allowing women to serve in combat roles in the military.

The space ship example is not intended to be an exceptional empirical case, so it is not limited in significance by its rarity. Rather, it is just a thought experiment to exclude the influence of cultural disapproval in creating the psychiatric harm which is now associated with pederasty in modern western societies. To make the point that there is something about intimate, pleasurable, physical contact between older people and younger ones that inevitably traumatizes the younger person for life, driving them into instant insanity from the massive psychiatric devastation of this action, it has to be established that this act in itself is harmful. It seems difficult to understand why society would regard an intimate, physical pleasure such as a massage as totally harmless, while it would descend into a profound moral panic if this exact same action were to be turned a few degrees to the left or right to become a sexual pleasure. At what point on the continuum does traumatization for life inevitably set in in the child from a sufficiently sexualized massage, and at what point is the action absolutely trivial and harmless because it is just a mutually physically pleasurable massage? I really just cannot see how a pleasurable action, performed in a cultural vacuum, or in a culture which approved that action, could somehow necssitate lifelong psychiatric trauma. I wish someone could actually trace out for me the precise mechanism by which this instant and massive induction of insanity, unavoidable in any and every form of human culture imaginable, would be caused. It seems to me that the presumption that sexual consent by children must be denied because sex is so massively risky simply reflects the cultural hatred and fear of sex rather than any risk so great that young people cannot consent to it. When I was 10 my figure skating teacher persuaded me, though she could see I was quite reluctant, to attempt a difficult jump, and when I landed I caught the pick of my skate on the ice and fell forward, being seriously injured. But despite this, no one in the society who knew about my taking such a significant risk of physical and psychiatric harm at the tender age of 10 for reasons more of interest to my parents and the skating teacher than to me felt that I was exploited, or that I should be stopped from ever taking that risk again, or that the police should be called, or that I must inevitably have been traumatized for life. Now why not? Obviously, because the risk I took and the harm I experienced was not sexual! Yet taking a much smaller sexual risk at that age would have sent the entire neighborhood into a frenezy of hysterical outrage. The difference can only be that the one activity was sexual and the other would not have been. Conducting an inventory of my own memories, I would say that like Moontanman, I had a strong sexual interest at a very young age. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that he and I are exceptions and that most young people are not very interested in sex. But children are coerced by adults into all sorts of activities all the time which are either of much more interest to the adults than to the children, or of absolutely no interest to the children, or are even hated by the children, and yet society not only does not disapprove of these actions for that reason, but it even approves of them. Take for example religious education, which children find either boring or terrifying, depending on whether it consists in sitting on hard wooden benches listening to old people recite utterly meaningless rants about who begat whom and people being swallowed by whale, or whether it involves terrifying children with tales of eternal damnation, hellfire, sin, guilt, alienation from one's own natural biological drives, etc. Now all of this is clearly exploitative, since it uses children in support of the adults' interest in propagating the superstitions which imprison their own minds, and it has no interest whatsoever in whether the children are bored or terrified by the experience. So why, in a society where this happens all the time without complaint, do we go hysterical if we find that children are being exploited for adults' interests in pederasty? The latter case is especially strange, since in contrast to religion, children actually have a natural interest in sex, so the exploitation, if it exists at all, would be infinitely less than in religious education.

But the whole problem is, how do you get someone operating within the realm of 'public reason,' that is, reasoning based on generally available and testable empirical facts plus logical inferences from them, to regard some transcendental perspective outside that, such as the religious dimension, as having any argumentative weight? Since all discussion has to begin within public reason, since it is impossible for rational discussion to assume that everyone already believes in truths of revelation, the essential challenge is to build a bridge between the physical and the metaphysical. To do this, you can't use a concept which is itself already metaphysical, such as a subtle and invisible set of subterranean causal connections, so that the newborn being eaten by wolves somehow turns out to be absolutely necessary or the whole universe will fall apart or some benevolent purpose will not be realized. Instead, you have to construct a link supported by empirical evidence and ordinary logical inference from it to get your initially non-metaphysical audience to accept the kind of magical 'possibility' your argument requires.

Horza is right: Turning the initial idea around makes an even more powerful point. If we knew we had an infinite life ahead of us, absolutely nothing would matter, since we could repeat everything infinitely to get it right eventually, so there would be no significance in any individual outcome.

A 19th century English case, R. v. Prince, established the rule that there could be statutory rape of a young person only if the older person having sex were at least 3 years older than the younger partner. This has been adopted in various forms in the legal codes of various common law countries. The idea seems to be that it must be exploitation if an older person induces a younger person to have sex with him or her, because the difference in ages makes independent, autonomous agreement impossible. But when I was 10 my figure skating teacher persuaded me to attempt a difficult jump and when I landed, I hit the pick of my blade on the ice, fell on my face, and was severely injured. Now why is this case of an older person persuading a younger person to do something carrying potential risks perfectly legal, while an older person persuading a younger person to do something much less risky, such as sex, is regarded as one of the most horrendous crimes in modern society? The explanation must have absolutely nothing to do with age, autonomy, or risk, but just with society's strange assumption that children acting out their natural curiosity and interest in sex is inherently evil.

Sex is restricted in the rest of the animal kingdom, but only insofar as females are not always in heat. Since this is not the case with humans, from the perspective of nature there would be no reason to restrict mating.

In fact, the way organ transplantation operates proves the converse of the assertion in the OP. When organs are transplanted from one human to another, they have to be matched by blood type, tested for tissue specific antigens, and then matched again by human leukocyte antigen groups. Even after all that matching has been performed just to make the transplant possible, the recipient's immune system still has to be massively suppressed by heavy doses of highly toxic immunosuppressive drugs during the initial phase, and then these medications have to be continued at lower doses throughout the life of the graft. But even with all of that done, there is still chronic allograft disease which ultimately destroys the transplanted organ much sooner than its normal life expectancy. This process is poorly understood, but seems to involve some persisting immunological rejection. But when animal organs are transplanted into humans, normally a hyperacute rejection occurs, and instead of the graft being lost under immunosuppression after 10 to 20 years, such as happens with human organ transplants, the graft can be lost within hours. The rare cases of successful baboon heart transplants in human infants have used massive amounts of anti-rejection drugs. All of this demonstrates the evolutionary gap between humans and animals.

Okay, pederasty. Consider this example to help clarify how much of the supposed 'harm' of childhood sexual experience with adult partners is just a cultural presupposition based on society's desire to find everything it disapproves of to be harmful: A male child is born to a mother on a spacecraft who dies in childbirth. The only other person on the spacecraft is the operator, a 20-year-old male. By growing up on the spacecraft during its journey of many decades, the child is never socialized in a conventional way, since the operator of the craft is more scientifically than theologically or culturally interested. When the child is 10, the adult sprains his back and asks the child to massage his back to restore him to health. This is totally outside the child's experience or interest, and is exlusively in the interest of the adult, but the child complies. Now I assume that no one would assume that the child would be traumatized for life by this experience of physical intimacy the astronaut, even though the child was not really interested in it and was consenting only reluctantly. But now suppose the adult astronaut asks for sex with the child, of the sort that Ancient Greek adult males practised with their young boyfriends, which did not involve any anatomically harmful penetration. Even if the child had no interest in this and complied only reluctantly, why would he respond to it any differently than he would to the massage? He has had no cultural training to teach him that sex is dirty, dangerous, or something that will drive other adults and authority figures into fits of hysteria if they hear that children are indulging in it, especially with adult partners. I cannot imagine how the child in this hypothetical case would find the sexual interaction as anything other than an usual sort of experience, much like giving his first back massage or learning about the planets by observing them out the porthole of the spacecraft. But unless someone can explain how we would have to assume that the child in this example would immediately become traumatized for life by the experience, then we are forced to admit that all the supposed 'harm' of child sex 'abuse' is really just unnecessarily created by society's disapproval of it. The problem with those who assume that underage sex must be traumatizing is that society has artificially made an ordinary biological pleasure into something magical, inextricably linked to vast romantic significance and great dangers, like the Ark of the Covenant. But in fact sex could be understood as a necessary biological drive analogous to eating. Sure, eating with someone you love is a better experience than having lunch with your teacher, but it's no big deal either way, and eating ham and eggs with someone much older than you, or in a meal to which you did not consent, or when you are inexperienced at eating such a diet, etc., will not traumatize you for life. But if we regarded food as sacred; if we ate only in the privacy of our bedrooms with the curtains drawn; if we required people when they were young adults to pick one single food as their favorite and eat nothng but that for the rest of their lives or be labelled adulterers; if we gasped in horror at finding that one of our neighbors had actually gone to the seedy section of town and paid money for food from a waitress he didn't even know, much less love; then the idea of children sharing their meals with older men would send us screaming to the police.

I have often had the experience of thinking of some peculiar thing on a given day, and then finding that on the following day someone starts talking to me about it, or I hear some news story about it, even though it is a rather obscure topic. But I think the apparent 'psychic experience' effect here is just a case of observer bias, since I think of thousands of things every day, and every day thousands of things are presented to me, and I only notice the coincidental pairings between the two, which may actually be quite few, although they seem frequent because I give them such emphasis and ignore all the misses. This may be described in part by Poisson Clumping, since the number of pairs of impressions between my thoughts and impressions from the outside world is much larger than the number of thoughts I have.

The problem with life, as the Existentialist philosophers would say, is that it can have any point you want. So the recommendation to quit smoking assumes that the ultimate point of life is to continue it as long as possible, while most of the cool dudes you see smoking in Parisian cafes seem to assume that the point of life is to enjoy the moment with a kind of reckless flair. To summon the will to quit smoking requires not only that you focus on the health benefits and discipline yourself to act on those perceived advantages, but also that you adopt the nervous, frightened, health- and longevity-obsessed perspective of modern Western culture, which is really quite an innovation. No one was buying 'heart attack prevention cereal' in the 1950s. There is also an important medical benefit to smoking, which is that it is a major relaxation drug used by nervous and mentally disturbed people as their preferred form of self-medication. For years psychiatrists have remarked how heavily schizophrenics smoked, and this is probably doing them some psychological good. All drugs have side-effects, and perhaps some people may prefer to accept the risks of smoking for whatever psychiatric benefits it provides for them.

I thought the Romans were quite religious, believing in a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses, whom early Christianity adopted and made into corresponding saints. A lot has been written about how the murder and and post-mortem rebirth or survival of Dionysus and Orpheus seamlessly morphed into the Christian idea of a god who is killed and is reborn, so it seems to me that both the Romans and the Christians were very much alike in their religious attitudes. However, to keep this comment focused on the thread topic, it seems clear that we don't really need any anchoring of experience in absolute foundations, whether theological or material, in order to find it important. Just look at how passionately two chess masters are committed to the outcome of a game which is, when seen from a wider perspective, just colored wooden pieces pushed over a checkerboard. We can change our existential focal width at will and find all the meaning we need in a single moment or in the ultimate fate of a thousand-year empire.

The limit on the significance of that technology is that while many diseases have a genetic component, so many different environmental influences interact with that genetic basis that it is next to impossible to predict who will actually develop the disease linked to the genes and who will not. A good example of this is type 1 diabetes, where you have only a 50% concordance for identical twins, who are usually reared under identical environmental circumstances. So even with identical genes and nearly identical environments, the actual development of disease can still be quite unpredictable. Relatively few diseases are like Huntington's Chorea, where one dominant gene determines for certain that the patient will develop the disease if he lives long enough. And even then, how useful is it to detect the gene? There is always great excitement in the media whenever the genetic component of a disease is discovered, but we have known the causes of many diseases for centuries without being able to do anything to prevent them. Consider the impact of the discovery of a test for the Huntington's gene: All that has come of it is that many people have been hurled into utter despair for decades before they would otherwise have had anything to worry about. Another wonder of modern medicine!

But significantly, even in societies where the possibility of the sexual transmission of disease was not understood, sex was still regarded as something sacred and was thus hedged in with elaborate rituals to ensure that it would only become accessible after all the proper rites were complied with. In the ancient world, before Columbus' crew returned with syphilis acquired from the New World, there were probably no truly serious sexually-transmitted diseases other than yaws and other ordinarily communicable diseases such as the flu. In Islamic culture there is a prohibition against sex with people suffering from certain types of leprosy, though that disease is normally minimally communicable. The fear of unwanted pregancy as a reason for limiting sex only comes into existence after access to sex has already been limited, since people, like their nearest simian relatives, are naturally constantly promiscuously sexual. Thus the bushmen of the Kalahari region of Southwest Africa never understood the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, since everyone was always having sex with everyone else, so partnership was insufficiently stable for the causal link to be discerned.

Arne Hoffmann, 'Sind Frauen Bessere Menschen?,' makes a good argument that much of the shorter life expectancy of men can be accounted for by the greater risks they are expected by society to endure. Working in coal mines, the police, the fire service, and the military is still a role occupied predominantly by men. Society has always followed the rule of 'women and children first' in any disaster, which also cuts down on male life expectancy. Since feminists are now rigorously searching through every social institution to detect the structural discriminations against women in them, it is only fair to note that the discriminations are not all on one side. I agree with the earlier poster that since the survival of most species depends on the number of females, who constitute a bottleneck on the breeding capacity, rather than males, who can each impregnate thousands of females, having more female births is favored by Darwinian pressures. Also, women are physiologically more stable than men and much more concentrated in the center of the Bell curve of distribution for any feature you can imagine, which also maximizes the number of women who will be healthy enough to breed. This is why Nobel Prize winners are almost exclusively male, while institutions for the severely mentally disabled are predominantly male. Similarly, for many inherited diseases such as hemophilia, women are carriers but men are the ones affected. In men, nature can afford to take gambles with more extreme features, since a few males so freakishly malformed that they can't breed won't hurt the survival of the species very much. One the strangest phenomena in male:female sex ratios is that the percentage of male births always increases markedly after a major war in which large numbers of men are killed. How do the eggs and sperms know that they should respond to this loss in the male population?