I don’t know if you’re just being facetious but from their point of view the death penalty is sacrificing the few to save the many. If you kill a murderer, other people will be less inclined to murder, thus reducing the murder rate and saving lives. There are dozens of problems with that “reasoning” of course but…

Now you want us to play nice with the Red States because, what, it might hurt some poor Trumpkins?

I was not trying to say that you personally believe that we should just sit on our hands until things work themselves out. My concern is just that people are averse to difficulty and so seek out excuses to avoid difficult things. If they are given the “out” that it’s OK if they don’t work to change things because…

I appreciate this sentiment (I also don’t want my tax money going to fuckers like this) but keep in mind who would actually suffer if we did cut them off. It’s not these lawmakers.

I feel like this advice would not be out of place in a lot of Jennifer Lawrence’s roles...

What’s your favorite part of space? Mine is space.

“Intervene” is probably the wrong word. I meant why bother to, say, defend abortion rights now if any progress is necessarily temporary and things will get better on their own without our direct involvement?

Obviously I have no basis to contradict your personal experience. But, from my personal experience, that “dangerous switch” has more to do with the individual than a universal human trait.

I think you’re right that we’ve exhausted this particular avenue of discussion (whether political conservatism could be removed from the population at large through natural evolutionary processes). But I think there’s room for discussion about the utility of believing humans will “evolve out of” conservatism. To whit,…

I think you are taking a cultural difference and assuming a biological basis for it. To be clear, I’m with you that humans have a residual instinctual attachment to things that would have aided our success in the ancient past, regardless of their current utility. That attachment kicks in for guns if they are…

I’m perfectly happy to continue the discussion but I’m equally happy to part ways.

My objection is not to the research itself (which I’ve found interesting, so cheers for linking it) but with the conclusions you are drawing from it. Your conclusions do not follow from the information provided and I am pointing that out. It’s not merely a semantic debate; that is how discussions are supposed to work:…

If humans have a biological attachment to guns, as you claim, and no society with such an attachment would ever pass restrictions on guns, as you agreed here, then there should be no countries with strict gun laws.

Everything in your post contradicts your earlier statement that humans are biologically attached to guns.

There is a difference between the statement “conservatives have a stronger negativity bias than liberals” and the statement “stronger negativity bias causes political conservatism”. The first statement is the conclusion of the two studies you have linked; the second is not. The first statement is based on the research…

But that’s exactly my point. If being biologically attached to guns is a universal human trait, that would indicate that no country would ever pass restrictive gun laws. And yet many countries have stringent gun laws or even total bans. Even the UK, which shares with the US a colonial past and its own flavor of…

Yes but now more left handed people are ambidextrous because their environment forces them to be.

i do think that our attachment to guns is biological, but i think most cultures don’t glorify violences [sic] as much so its about access. which is the part of that quote you left out. other cultures simply don’t allow unfettered access and total freedom.

You’re right that it’s over-simplifying to say that negativity bias is genetic; it’s much more likely that there are a number of factors involved. Since you were talking about “evolving out of it” that really focuses on the genetic component. But if negativity bias is like handedness—there is a genetic component that…

You can use a hammer to build a house and you can use it to kill someone. Is it a tool or a weapon? The point being that the line between benign tool and malicious weapon is not so clear-cut as “the story of human technology is violence”.