Suggesting that faith schools could be held to serve an evolutionary purpose, Andrew Brown, who loves to turn a conventional argument upside down and shake it all about, includes this wonderful line – the last sentence in the quotation below.
He points to his undergraduate audiences that there are about sixty of them in a room together, unrelated strangers, young men and women who are, in chimpanzee terms, on heat. Yet they sit all quietly in ordered rows, without touching either to fight or grope. If you could somehow get a mixed sex group of fifty unrelated adolescent chimps into a room together (he suggests this might be possible if they were first restrained, and had bags put over their heads) as soon as the bags were removed, they would go crazy, fighting killing and raping each other, if they did not manage to flee. This behaviour is only observed in human beings online.
Comments on this entry are closed.