HUMAN PROGRESS IN MAJOR & MINOR KEYS

PROGRESS PLAYED IN A MAJOR KEY

Scientists at the Scripts Research Institute in Florida have conducted experiments with rats (what else?) that strongly suggest: "We are now making our food very similar to cocaine. Especially junk food like cheesecake, frosting, bacon and other fatty, high-calorie foods."

If you're like me, your appetites won't want to hear the rest of this, so proceed at your own risk!

When given unlimited amounts of these foods, lab rats quickly became addicted as these meals lit up the pleasure centers of their brains. As if they were taking drugs. The more they ate, the more they needed to eat. Then when the foods were removed, the rats at first refused to eat anything at all. It was the crash after the high.

Dr Gene-Jack Wang concluded: "Fast-food meals and other heavily processed foods are stripped of fiber and nutrition, thereby designed to trigger our innate preferences for fat, sugar, and salt." So the next time you pass a MacDonald or a Burger King, remember this yummy stuff actually alters your brain chemistry in much the same way that cocaine does.

Carrots, anyone...?

PROGRESS PLAYED IN A MINOR KEY

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water....!

There is this other group of research scientists in England who have studied another region of the brain (the right temporoparietal junction just behind the right ear) which they say is responsible for our moral reasoning. To verify their hypothesis, they placed a painless magnetic pulse to the scalp, scrambling the electronic signals of the neurons there.

The human subjects, with this moral center now inoperative, reached moral decisions in which "they gave less emphasis to the good or bad intent of selected actions." Researcher Liane Young told BBC News: "You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior. So to be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."

What may be still more astonishing is how today's relentless experiments by neuro-biologists seem to make of our species just another member of the animal kingdom. Slightly higher on the food chain than the baboon and dolphin, but not much...!

And thus we are left to wonder if 5000 years of philosophical & theological thought about good & evil, honor & justice, virtue & morality has been wasted on a species no more significant in the cosmos than any other pile of planetary dust?

If so, does this mean we best burn down our libraries and universities to replace them with sophisticated Orwellian human hatcheries....?