@Randem

Expelled has been exposed. Ben Stein’s godawful tragedy of a mockumentary has been revealed for the blubbering nonsense it really is: lying theist propaganda. The emperor has no clothes, Ben.

The strange thing is, all the awful reviews it is receiving actually make me want to have a look at this nonsense. Maybe it’s morbid curiosity. After all, I enjoy Bruce Campbell movies, too.

You’re riding down in the elevator, and you reach the lobby. The doors open, and before you get a chance to move, there are a dozen people already pushing into the elevator before it’s even empty. It happens every day.

The crowd in the lobby doesn’t even wait to see if there are actually people on the elevator… they just see the doors open and start climbing in… only acknowledging your presence if they happen to bump into you on their self-concerned journey to the upper floors.

It’s rude. And I don’t stand for it. When I’m riding in an elevator, I stand directly in front of the door once I get near my destination floor. When the doors open I stand firm, blocking entrance for anyone who doesn’t give me space to exit.

We’ve all been that hurried passenger, anxious to get into the elevator. But why do some people eventually slow down and look while others never learn?

How might the various schools of thought answer this question? Let’s see…

Social determinism
The passengers who wait calmly must come from better homes and have higher education, whereas those who push their way into the elevator without concern for people trying to exit must come from broken homes with divorced parents, and have attended bad schools.

Environmental determinism
The patient people who wait for the elevator to empty must come from warmer climates, which formed lazy, relaxed attitudes, while the impatient people are from colder climates and have a more driven work ethic.

Evolutionary psychology
There were no elevators in the Savannah, so our minds are not evolved to deal with the conditions of vertical transportation.

Chaos theory
A pigeon flapping its wings in the promenade outside caused a chain reaction of events eventually leading to the urgency, or lack thereof, of passengers to enter the elevator car.

Freudian psychology
The lobby is a cold, scary place, and passengers long to enter the warm, womb-like safety of the elevator… no doubt due to some repressed sexual desire for their parents. The patient ones are simply repressing their oedipal sexual urges to penetrate the elevator.

Jungian psychology
Those who push their way into the elevator without empathy for the passengers trying to exit have very repressed shadow selves due to failure to admit their own failures, shortcomings, and weaknesses.

Pavlovian psychology
After being hit by the closing doors, or being left behind for not boarding the elevator fast enough, people eventually learn to enter the elevator as forcefully as necessary in order to get aboard and avoid negative stimuli.

Then there’s Randem Psychology. My theory is simple: those who push their way into the elevator, ignoring the passengers who try to exit, are inconsiderate, self-absorbed, rude. They’re assholes, and they need to be knocked down a peg. And that’s why I block the door and prevent their entry until they make room for the current passengers to exit.

The Council of Europe, a non-governmental body whose aim is to protect human rights, has adopted a resolution regarding the dangers of creationism in education.

You know it’s gonna be good when it starts like this:

Creationism in any of its forms, such as “intelligent design”, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are definitely inappropriate for science classes.

Oh, if only my fellow Americans had as much common sense.

Today I was turned on to Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain Theory, and I must say that it’s pretty interesting. The idea he puts forward is that the human brain is made up of three seperate brains in one, which are:

• The R-complex, or reptilian brain, which would be the most basic of the three. Developed during early stages in our evolution (in case the name wasn’t obvious enough) the reptilian complex is responsible for basic brain functions such as movement, digestion, reproduction, circulation, breathing, and the execution of fight-or-flight reaction.
• The Limbic system, or mammal brain, which were developed during a middle stage of our evolution. The mammal brain includes the amygdala, responsible for associating events with emotion, and the hippocampus, which provides our long-term memory. Love, hate, fear, joy, pity, rage come from the limbic complex.
• The Neocortex (sometimes called cerebral cortex), or human mind, which occupies five-sixths of the space within our heads. The cerebral cortex gives us communication, logic, operational thinking, and the ability to plan.

The idea suggests that - in spite of how civilized we’d like to think we are - the Neocortex doesn’t run the show. In fact, it’s only when the two underlying brains are not in control that the Neocortex gets to run the show. In modern society, we find our basic needs met, so we’re able to feed our human mind, but order of importance starts from oldest-to-youngest.

This is the part that really starts to get fascinating for me, because it makes so much sense. It explains why, when faced with a dangerous situation, we do things we didn’t know we were capable of - often without emotion, and we often have a very cloudy memory when it’s done. It explains why even the smartest people we know make such horrible decisions when they think they’re in love… or for that matter when they’re irate, as well.

I’m always the one to say that the reason for everything we do is written in our DNA - particularly when I’m talking about relationships and/or sex - but this gives me a whole new depth to the idea. Indeed, it’s really quite fascinating how much of human nature seems to be something we have little ability to do anything about!