We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.