cosmo wrote:

Thanks for the condescending rhetoric, had_enough, but your answer is unscientific and explains nothing. Evolution does not work according to "social pressure." In fact, evolution works by selecting so-called "outliers", but only if their unique traits are somehow helpful to their survival.

^^^^^^^^^

My post was conceptual in nature, not meant to be a rigorous, scientific abstract. And you deliberately misread my post, above.

I never said that "evolution works according to social pressure" as you state above. Go back and read the original post. I said we are born with an inclination to believe in the supernatural, it's in our DNA. And social pressure does the rest. That is NOT the same thing as saying that evolution works through social pressure, and it's not what I meant. So quit putting words into my mouth, or at least read what I wrote for its plain meaning.

And your comment about outliers proves my point. Atheism is NOT a good survival trait. Belief in the flying spaghetti monster is. And that is all I said.

Evolution does not necessarily select outliers. That status is irrelevant to evolution. Evolution selects for survival adaptation. Belief in the flying spaghetti monster is, so far, a good survival adaptation. Although, if we are in overshoot, as a number of ecologists suspect, religious belief may prove to be our undoing as a species (see "multiply and dominate the earth" or however the Bible has it. A fine survival adaptation for a primitive world. Not so great for one with 6-billion people on it.)

Your posts continue to be intellectually incoherent at best. I'm done.

...tell me, all, does the fact that this man is discussed as a serious Presidential candidate confirm that our political system in broken?

I'm having real trouble coming up with a single President in our history who was like this dude. Maybe some of them had some of his qualities, but I have to wonder if any of them were quite as whacked, or as apparently dangerous, as Rudy.

Can someone come up with a President like Rudy out of our history? He seems more like the sort of guy who would have risen to the top in the Balkans, or Africa...no joke. I think the guy is very, very dangerous and I sure hope Rahm Emmanuel, or Dean, or someone, is thinking about how to take him apart in the general. Nothing like starting early on important projects, ya know.

Any GOP nominee is gonna be some kind of nut, it seems. But Giuliani? He is an extraordinary kind of nut.