An anonymous poster wrote, "Smart people think clearly."

May I humbly and respectfully offer the following:

First, let's define smart people. By "smart people" I mean people with measurably high intelligence, although the current measurement systems leaves much to be desired. These are the people capable of understanding all or some of complex issues like the higher maths, engineering, programming in code, genetics, neurology, etc. They are good at logic and IQ tests, for whatever that's worth.

To be good at these things, you have to be able to think or visualize concepts at a certain level of abstraction, or to intuitively do this "behind the scenes," so to speak. But they do not always think clearly, particularly not when their personal lives are involved.

Many highly intelligent people have a broad variety of mental disorders. Many rationalize away their problems. Many are autistic types, with difficulties understanding social interaction, which can certainly hamper social decision-making. Many simply see the world very differently from the rest of us.

Look at people like Ted Kaczynski, whose IQ was reportedly at least 4 standard deviations from the norm (smarter than 99.997% of the population). He was brilliant, but he did not think clearly.

Personally, my view is that the more "smarts" you have, the more chances there are for short-circuits and crossed wires. This is why genius is so often equated with madness.

To Spontaneous Objector: personally, the only ethical reason I can see to evade your commitment is a strong moral disagreement with the purposes the military currently serves. People already in the military before Bush misused it, or people who signed up out of patriotism, are to be commended for their choices. But to sign up now, you have to understand you may be asked to support an unethical war. Of course, you might feel that way and still want to sign up, to be able to provide positive behavior from within the system.

You apparently don't feel strongly about this one way or the other, or you would have either (a) not signed up or (b) not tried to get out so easily.

You need to figure out what you're passionate about, where your beliefs and ethics lie, and what kind of goal you would sacrifice for. Only then can you decide if you should pull out of the military. It's possible they can provide you with the tools you need to achieve your long-term goals; it's possible they will interfere. But don't just get out because of fear, or for changing your mind without having an alternate goal clearly established.

Someone said that dogs were not carnivores, but omnivores; that of the two, only cats were omnivores. They went so far as to chastise a vet for calling dogs carnivores. I thought I'd clarify the situation a bit.

While in practice it's obviously correct to call dogs omnivores, the vet was also correct, from a scientific perspective. People popularly (and correctly) associate terms like omnivore, carnivore, and herbivore simply with diet, but biology, particularly systematics (the study of biological taxonomies), uses a different standard.

The definition of carnivore I learned in vertebrate zoology was one of dental anatomy. A carnivore (a member of family Carnivora) has carnassials. These are very large teeth, located to the back, with three roots, designed to assist in crunching and grinding bones. Cats and dogs both have them, as do bears and some others. Canines are frequently found in carnivores, but since they are also found in other creatures, the carnassials are used to differentiate.

Now, this does not mean that using diet to apply the labels of "omnivore," "carnivore," and "herbivore" is wrong. Bears and humans are clearly omnivorous (although bear teeth show much more omnivorous tendencies than human teeth). Cats and wolves are primarily carnivores, although they will also eat some plants, probably for the same reason wolves do, which is to help cleanse the digestive system, particularly when something else they ate doesn't agree with them.

Humans, from a dental perspective, are closer to herbivores than we are to omnivores or carnivores (look up the teeth patterns online of bears, deer or cattle, and wolves or cats to see what I'm talking about). But we are clearly able to live as omnivores, and so are dogs. Still, since dogs are a subset of Canis lupus, and C. lupus gets the vast majority of its diet from meat, you have to wonder if we're good for them or not. Over the millenia dogs have developed proportionally smaller brains (in comparison to the wolf), and less complex and smaller teeth, and with a few rare exceptions, are usually smaller in size. Even if you compare a Great Dane's teeth to a wolf of comparable size, the Great Dane's teeth are smaller and less complex in ridges, peaks, etc.

You have to wonder how much of that is adaptive selection and how much is poor diet.