Word: fires
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...during a school baseball game when Rory Hamill strode out of center field carrying a shotgun he wouldn't put down, and David had to shoot him dead. That caused a little stir. Then Bill Farnum locked his wife and son in their farmhouse and set the place on fire. Each of the perpetrators had this strange dead look on his face. Pretty soon, one by one, the good folk of Ogden Marsh were turned into psycho killers. The normals had become the crazies. And all because they drank the water. (See pictures of the Rise of the Zombies...
...that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire. (See the top 10 religion stories...
Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if - or maybe especially if - those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped...
Officials treated the death as a homicide - though one with a decidedly uncommon perpetrator - and within two days, investigators had been to the scene, sorted out the rapid-fire sequence of events that led to the death and essentially closed their books on the case. But the question that remained unanswered - in addition to the matter of what should be done with Tilikum now - is why the animal lashed out. What goes on in the mind of so complex a creature that causes it to become so fierce so fast - and is there anything that can be done to prevent...
Some kids, I’ve noticed, use the same one every time: “I once lit my toe on fire; I was five.” Everyone chuckles. Some kids are awkward, and just tell you they’re really not that interesting and hence have nothing to say (words of advice: just make something up). Anyhow, as we’re all playing the fun-fact game, the TF finally looks to me. As I begin my introduction, “Hi, my name is Cather...” I suddenly...