Email from a new Canadian friend and my personal Canadian political coach:
" Jim Xxxxxx xxxxxxx25|AT|gmail.com Email address>
So, now I am the student. Please explain how this US election has turned into such a brain fart. Please use electoral process in your lecture as I seem to be quite entertained by the whole reality TV similarities. I am familiar with the electoral college and the numbers required. I just don't understand how we in Canada seem to have been able to maintain some elements of respect for the truth.
Seems to me 2 minutes in a debate are far too few to contest 3-4 lies per opponents time.
Talk about choosing between the devil you know and the devil you don't know...
Please explain, oh wizard of the South.
Your Canada 101 prof."
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If DNA doesn't reproduce and adapt, then that particular strain of DNA dies out. That fact, regarding the evolutionary process, is the genesis of the phrase, "survival of the fittest." From the earliest moments of life on this planet, until relatively recently, the emotion of empathy was a handicap to existence. If a creature were to experience empathy for another creature that was about to be a meal, then starvation would ensue and that DNA would, for lack of adapting, die. Historical records bear out the fact that mankind has had a much more violent, less empathic, past than more modern man.
Simultaneous with the need to procreate in order to survive, came the biological mandate to protect the progeny and thus was born the emotion of empathy. Almost immediately, came the realization that there was greater safety in numbers and so the "herding instinct" came about as an ancillary survival instinct. These basic survival instincts have remained active, effective and mostly unchanged throughout recorded and observable history -- until relatively recently.
As mankind evolved, at some point we began to explore the likelihood that certain destructive aspects of the herding instinct were counterproductive. While some communal aspects were beneficial, such as commerce and security, other aspects, like trade restrictions and pre-emptive wars. were not. Considering the accelerating hazards at hand, this departure from the negative features of our ongoing DNA quest for survival has been painfully slow in its evolution.
National boundaries and country loyalties are the remnants of our waning herding instinct, as the world moves toward globalization. For the majority of the world's population, empathy for our young and the "herd" has evolved into a broader instinct driven empathy for ALL living things. However, the segment of our population who have not been endowed with an expanded sense of empathy are actually embedded with a more primitive lack of that emotional attachment to others. These people are psychologically identified as sociopaths and often exhibit psychopathic tendencies, as well.
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