In "The Selfish Gene," Richard Dawkins said in his characteristic blunt manner, "We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." No matter how inflammatory Dawkins' rhetoric might sound, his observation is consistent with the conclusions of Axelrod's agent-modeling studies.

Why is Dawkins' accurate assessment "inflammatory?? What is it about humans that they are incapable of facing hard facts? Including that there is no such thing as "free will" - which is but an illusion invented by the brain to confer more power on humans than they actually possess.

All the cumulative evidence discloses we are organic robots at the beck and call of chemicals. Change the thresholds for nerve receptors or chemical (e.g. endorphin) concentrations just a bit and our behavior changes. We fancy ourselves free agents but this is a monumental delusion.

Am I a "free agent" really pounding out these words? No. I read something in the article, it triggered my amygdala into action and I responded. The words were retreived from language centers in the neocortex but the response itself is almost entirely automatic. Could I choose not to reply - maybe - but then the words of a possible response would keep replaying in my brain like a broken CD disc.

Even Einstein (in his grand book, Ideas and Opinions) observed there was no such thing as free will. As he noted:

“The man who is thoroughly convinced of universal causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events- provided of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causation really seriously.

He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity – internal and external- so that he cannot be responsible….any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motion it undergoes.”

Madame Defarge wrote:

The good news is that we also have a reasoning brain, otherwise we'd be still be stuck in a perpetual dark ages.

While sociologically, it sometimes seems as if the Age of Enlightenment never happened, it did.

Yes, in relatively small European enclaves of science and culture. But let us also bear this in mind:

i) In most of the rest of the planet slavery, cannibalism and blood sacrifice still reigned.

ii) Even in the midst of the so-called European Enlightenment the Inquisition ocntinued, branded free thinkers as heretics, and tortured them, and seized their property.

The fact of the matter is that the neocortex (from which the Enlightenment was spawned) is really a novel addition to the brain, probably (according to Robert Ornstein, see his 'Evolution of Consciousness') less than a half million years old, if that.

The more ancient brain centers-regions (reticular formation etc.) were there long before and doing their lizard brain thing in entrenched ways eons before the neo-cortex appeared with its high-minded idealism and possibilities.

Arthur Koestler (see his 'Ghost in the Machine') wasn't at all convinced that high reason oculd be harnessed to the good, or betterment of mankind - so long as the neocortex reasoning centers were wired into the more ancient brain regions. Look, after all, at Nazi Germany and how reason was used to articulate the "final solution" and also used to contruct the most hideously efficient death machine ever witnessed.

Yes, reason at work - but perverted in its ends. Just as the Spanish Inquisition was in its own, during the actual Age of the Enlightenment.

Koestler was so distressed by the human triplicate brain (paleo-cortex, mesocortex, neo-cortex) that he proposed using special chemicals to assist in its integration. In lectures I gave some twenty yrs. ago I took this one step farther - proposing the implantation of electrodes in the brain. It was not practical then, but with the advent of quantum dot technology it is now possible.

My point - as Jacob Needleman once noted (see chapter 1 of his 'Heart of Philosophy') is that having reason is no assurance that we will act "freely" or any different from the most warlike or aggressive chimps (which share over 98% of our DNA).

Reason - as the Inquisition and Nazis showed- can also be elaborately misplaced. (After all, the former reasoned it was preferable to burn the heretic in this life, the better to convey to him a "foretaste of Hell" if he didn't recant)

The use of electrodes in the brain - jus tlike Koestler's chemicals- would be done not to enslave mankind but to free the neocortex to achieve its full potential without the more ancient brain regions acting as an "albatross" in restricting higher degrees of freedom, insight and action.

It is worth a try, and yes, I would surely volunteer to go first.

Little things like defense, special teams, and coaching? - not important. Also, home-field advantage between two closely matched teams

Doesn't matter. In the end the Pats are an unstoppable machine. Adalius Thomas acquisition nailed whatever deficits existed in therir D, while Randy Moss and Wes Welker did the same for their 'O'. In a word, they have too many weapons.

Short of Bob Sanders & Dwight Freeny nailing Brady in a sandwich and Brady tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in one knee - look for the Pats to prevail 42 -10. (The Colts will slow them down in the first half, maybe keeping the score around 10-10, but the Pats will bust loose in the 2nd half).

Bottom line, so long as Brady is healthy and playing, NO one is sitpping NE this year. Brady is the key.