Cannibal Myth-Busting.

Myth: Cannibals eat people.
Fact: Like everyone else, cannibals only resort to eating people when no other food is available. The majority of cannibals go their whole lives without ever having to consume a conspecific.

Myth: Cannibals scare people.
Fact: It's not in a cannibal's interest to scare a person. Scared people tend to be harder to catch. Fear also leads to a release of adrenaline which must be used up in a fight or a flight or it breaks down into a toxic foul substance which does not taste at all good. This is why the cat always plays before it kills.
You may be afraid of the concept of being eaten by a cannibal, but the actual act itself is fearless.

Myth: Cannibals eat small babies.
Fact: In the first six months of life babies produce a special chemical which makes them taste pretty awful, to discourage the fathers from eating them.

Myth: Autistic people are cannibals.
Fact: This is only a hypothesis which has been neither proven or disproved.

Myth: All cannibals are autistic.
Fact: Just like left handed people, homosexuals, or illicit drug users, cannibals can come from any background, can be any race, either sex, or have any disability. The only way the average cannibal differs from the average non-cannibal is the tendency to have a slightly larger head, teeth and brain, slightly more forward facing eyes, and slightly higher intelligence than non-cannibals.

Myth: Cannibals cannot love or be loved.
Fact: Cannibals breed, so what's going on there if it ain't love?

Myth: Cannibals catch men to eat by tying a woman to a tree as bait.
Fact: Not since homosexuals first evolved, which was before knots were invented.

Myth: Cannibals invented the see-saw.
Fact: This is not a myth.

Myth: You know where you stand with Cannibals.
Fact: Cannibals did not invent the refrigerator, but then hobbling works better and is better company too!

'War' is 'Eating Babies' and that is 'Bad'.

Strictly speaking, males who can perform these kinds of acts are 'faulty males'.

Baby, gossip, zumzum

A (female) friend of mine has just given birth to a beautiful baby boy exceeding 7lb and perfectly healthy. Joy! It's what this blog is all about. Babies.

Babies... Babies,,, Baabiezzzmm

Autism caused by 'No Cannibals'?

There is yet another hypothesis for the aetiological drivers behind autism spectrum disorders which, just like the others, blames cannibals and is ignored by the autism community, the scientific community and the blogger community alike.

This one is different, however, in that it does not require autistic people to actually be cannibals for a change. Rather, it requires that the lack of the need for humans to guard against intra-specific predation has led to a de-selection of the mental and physical tools required to keep this brain-intensive skill on the genetic 'wants list'.

It goes something like this; A long time ago, probably 107,000 years ago, give or take a tick or two, people were people and people, like spiders, eat people when hungry enough. It's not as if we were eating our own brothers and sisters. Even little dragons don't do that (well, 20% less much).

It was some folk who'd been away for rather a long time up north found their way down south and, having polished off all the bears and elephants, turned their attentions to the people who were already happily occupying the Levant. These people, the Neanderthals, were very well equipped for taking advantage of this new food source. Recognising the Levantine folk as being sentient hunters, rather than risk a head-on encounter, the Neanderthal would remain at higher altitudes undetected, approaching and watching only at night. Only after considerable observations and planning had been completed did they chance a series of night raids which eventually became known to our ancestors, and later us, as the sagas of The Watchers in the Ge'ez and Hebrew chronicles, now known as the Bible (Gen 6).

Aadi, 'we' managed to extricate ourselves from this situation, with the help of a little Neanderthal DNA which we'd acquired along the way. The development of modern empathy was crucial to this great escape. After the Neanderthal predators had been discovered and descriptions of them were circulating, they moved into a more hands-on management role and more or less established the styles of man-management we see used right up until, well, still today in fact. Bluntly, any attempt to communicate secretly with ones' co-captured kin was met with a swift and brutal extinction of the dissenting person or persons.

When we finally managed to escape, we did it with our eyes. To this day, we celebrate with football.

That period of empathic development was an anti-predator adaptation. Now that it is no longer needed, it is falling away. Our bodies are no longer convinced that we must have empathy in order to survive so nature, the mother, the father, whatever steers our beings into being, decides that empathy is too expensive to sustain, and invests in FTW instead, a condition caused by getting food tokens confused with real food without the presence of the threat of cannibalism.

How can we test this hypothesis and how would it explain:

'New Autism Research Reveals Brain Differences at 6 Months in Infants Who Develop Autism'

as well as the 'Cannibal Hypothesis' does?

Babies. Therefore: Gossip.

Our sis over at AoA has been getting her knickers in a twist over some confusion about genes, worms, and SBC. Brother over at Science Blogs is on a lock-down. There never really was any dirt on Orac, no conspiracy. Simply a case of the big money advertisers on science blogs asking the admin to ask Orac to 'tone the cannabis and the Jacob down please' as money was threatening to pull out of the advertising side of things.

The only thing Orac every really did *badly* wrong was to censor Jakaranda ;)

Call off James Bond, put the kettle on. Nothing to see here. Move along.