The tenth plague in the Exodus story, the killing of all the firstborn children by the angel of death, has always been the most perplexing. It's widely believed that the first 9 plagues were caused by some kind of natural disaster, which might have been the eruption of the volcano on Thera around 1626 BC. [...]

I'm beginning to read Chomsky's theory on linguistics, which gives some good insight into how language is "generated" almost without effort in a child as he/she develops. The child's "language acquisition device" (LAD) can't help but generate a linguistic structure based on the information given to him during childhood. Words fall into certain grammatical "buckets" [...]

Stone age technology makes violence very difficult and limiting. In order to kill someone you need to have good aim and, assuming we're talking about stone technology before the Oldowan tool culture, blunt stones just make for crummy weapons in general. So you need a lot of people to join you. The Bible retains stoning [...]

A standard feature of magical thinking is to attribute non-physical causes to physical effects. A witch causes a man to be sick, and so a sorcerer will enact vengeance on the witch. If the witch happens to be found dead, or perhaps just apologizes, it's proof of the witch's guilt. Likewise, a rainmaker makes small [...]

A lot of news All news will claim your group (whatever it is - men, autistics, etc.) is being threatened by some other group, a movement, political party, etc. The news plays a story of a member of your group getting persecuted, and you will naturally build an internal motor representation (IMR) (a sort of [...]

I'm going to do a play-by-play breakdown of Simon Baron-Cohen's 1995 book Mindblindness, where he trumpets a theory that Autistics are handicapped by a lack of "Theory of Mind" (ToM) which most normal people find to be a straightforward and intuitive way of understanding the world. This is the same Baron-Cohen who claimed that Autistics [...]