It's Official!

In his What's New e-mail newsletter for September 21 (see the newsletter archives here), Robert L Park of the University of Maryland reports

THE MORAL LAW: THE GENETIC BASIS OF THE GOLDEN RULE. The feature story in the Science Times section of Tuesday’s NY Times is based on the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia. It reinforces recent brain scanning studies that found "mirror cells" in the motor cortex (see http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN07/wn081707.html). For the full story of how evolution designed our universal sense of right and wrong, see "Moral Minds" by Marc D. Hauser (Harper-Collins, 2006).

That makes it official! If there is truly a genetic basis for "our universal sense of right and wrong," then the fact that people like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin (to name just a few) do not share that "universal sense" conclusively demonstrates that they are not just inhuman but clearly non-human.