peut-être .

I know, and I felt kind of bad because she really seems to genuinely want a cat-dog hybrid, but I just couldn't help myself. ;)

Point redistribution differs from wealth redistribution in two ways:

- We won't die of starvation if we don't get points.

- Points are given out via a consistent set of rules that reward all members equally for equal participation. Wealth is distributed unevenly, in most cases justifiable rewarding hard work, imagination, or risk, but also often pooling in the hands of a few people by virtue of their position. (I know that's overly simplistic, but I'm just trying to point out that money is often not distributed evenly).

Personally, I don't believe in redistributing wealth, but I do believe in structuring society to distribute wealth more evenly in the first place, such as through minimum wage and labor unions.

P.S. I also think we need to have support for bulleted lists in these edit boxes. I totally tried to do this above using html tags, but they were ignored. :(

Not yet, but my cat and dog have been working on it for years. I'm sure they're close to getting it. ;)

Yes, but who's going to take out the trash and kill all the spiders?

They say (okay, I heard it once on TV) that the strongest marriages, on average, are those in which the wife looks better than the husband, and the husband makes more money than the wife. The theory is that the ideals of the sexes are different, so they can both 'win' in the comparisons that are important to them, and they can both see value in each other.

In a same sex couple, there's no obvious distinction like that, so I would think competition would be a bigger issue.

On the other hand, there is also a lot to be said for couples having a lot in common with each other. I've always said that if it weren't for the whole sex thing, men and women would never hang out together.

Already been done:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CatDog

My kids used to love that show. :)

I'm sure it is a serious debate, but right now I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything meaningful to say. All I can think of is "Hubba Hubba!". :)

I am totally pro-choice on this issue.

No, but we, as a species, did evolve the capacity for religion. Therefore, having religion must have given us some kind of competitive advantage. That's why I believe in God, and that he created men, including atheists.

It certainly helps. :)

You haven't been getting much lately, have you.

I often think about those who have lived before us, generation after generation, people living their lives, day after day, concerned about what they're concerned about, thinking that they're going to live forever in their youth, and then eventually coming to the hard conclusion that someday they're going to leave this world, until one day they're gone.

I never get much beyond that. I don't think there's much of a lesson here or anything; it's just something to think about.

Anyway, have a nice day everyone. :)

I don't think sci fi books count, unless they present a plausible mechanism through which the memories are stored. I do agree that instincts can be stored in the genes and passed from one generation to the next, but those instincts originated in the genes and are presumably only successful in being passed on when they confer some kind of competitive advantage, or at least don't confer a disadvantage. I don't think memories of events in your life can work their way back into the genome.

You're right about us only being able to interpret reality through our senses, but that doesn't mean that there are multiple realities, just multiple interpretations of reality. Some of these interpretations are bound to be more accurate than others. We just don't know which ones.

However, I think we can assign probabilities to the accuracies of various interpretations of reality, based on the results of experiments and such. If you do an experiment, and you make a theory based on that experiment, then you have a pretty good chance of being right. If you then make a theory based on that original theory, then you have a little less chance of being right. The further you are from actual concrete evidence, the less chance you have of being right.

I think that the existence of fairies and leprachauns, the existence of God, and the theories of the Big Bang and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are sofar from the actual first-hand experience that the probablility of them being accurate is fairly insignificant.

That's why I'm an atheist. :)

You aren't turning religious on us are you Joe? Getting a little closer to death, and maybe starting to get a little scared?

I once mentioned to you that I immortality lay in having children, because then your DNA would live on, as well as some of your ideas, etc., and you responded by saying that that wasn't very satisfactory to you. You said that that, to most people, immortality meant having the mind live on. With that in mind, all of your talk of your atoms being re-absorbed by the universe somehow is also not very satisfactory. I think we both have our way of coming to terms with our impending doom, and they're both pretty similar, and equally unsatisfactory, but they're all we've got.

Now, your talk about your memories possibly living on would bring a degree of satisfaction, if there was any reason to believe it. You're holding onto a 'maybe', but without any evidence of it, the odds of it being true are pretty slim. Maybe there are fairies and leprechauns too...

Did you know R. has started to turn religious? Right now I think you're the only atheist friend I have. I'd hate to think you were turning to the dark side as well. :(

I'm not sure 'like' is the right word. It's kind of freaky. :)

She's a woman, Joe, she doesn't care about the beer. Check the freezer and make sure the ice cream is okay.

In terms of our discussions, how is polygamy (or polyandry for that matter) any different than monogamy?

I stand corrected.

I tried scouring the internet for articles to support my argument, and I found one:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201203/the-evolutionary-history-love

But also found more that supported your argument, e.g.:

http://livepaola.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/a-history-of-love-or-why-american-marriage-is-loaded-with-so-many-expectations/

And several that showed a wide-spread and ancient concept of love (of several different types of love actually), but never tied them to marriage, e.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love#Cultural_views

I also remember from my one of my college anthropology classes reading about the Yanomamo of South America, and I remember that they got their wives by raiding neighboring villages and capturing their wives. I guess that doesn't fall into the marriage for love idea either.

Still, many ancient cultures do have concepts of marriage as being a life-long commitment, and stories of love go back about as far as written history, and it's hard to believe that these feelings wouldn't result in marriage when other, more practical matters, don't get in the way.

Is marriage for love really new? Certainly marriage has been used in the past for the purposes you mention, but all of the instances I've heard about are from wealthy families trying to strengthen alliances with other wealthy families. What about the rest of the population? What about "Romeo and Juliet" or "Pyramus and Thisbe"? Certainly love has been around for a long time, and it's hard to think how this could end in anything except marriage.

Certainly our society is changing a lot, and the drives that once resulted in having children no longer do, so we don't need a stable relationship in order to satisfy these drives. However, there are still benefits to having a stable relationship even when you don't have kids. It just remains to be seen whether those benefits outweigh the liabilities that happen when those relationships don't last.

So if we were to 'invent' marriage, would it look the same as what we have today? Probably not, and that's an interesting topic just by itself. I know the Catholic Church "requires" it's members to go through several classes before getting married, and one of those strongly suggested that my wife and I not get married, because of my atheism, but those suggestions can be ignored (as we obviously did).

I think what you're suggesting only makes sense if you also prevent people from having kids without first getting married, in which case, you're giving this institution the power to decide who can and can't have kids, which probably isn't a good.

What marriage has is a mythos (probably not the right word, but I can't think of a better one) built up around it where it's all about love, and it's supposed to be forever, and stuff like that. You have a big, expensive ceremony, buy big, expensive rings, invite a lot of people, and generally make a really big deal about it. This, supposedly, prevents people from going through with it without giving it a lot of thought. It also means that you've essentially declared your intentions before everyone that you care about, and the fact that they now all expect the two of you to stay together helps motivate people to stay together.

Of course, not everybody goes through all of this, I think because people today don't really have respect for old traditions, but those traditions are there for a reason, and if we followed those traditions more seriously, then perhaps we wouldn't have the high rate of divorce that we have today.

Would I outlaw divorce? Of course not, there are certainly situations in which a divorce is necessary. Would I make it more difficult to have a divorce? I'm not sure. Everything comes with a cost, and you have to decide what's more important. If you make divorces more difficult, then you may end up with fewer divorces, but you also have more unhappy parents, which is bad in and of itself, but also probably not any better for the kids anyway. You could try to outlaw easy marriages, such as elopements, but you can't force people to have expensive weddings or pay a lot of money to get married. You could require counseling before getting married, but then whose going to pay for that?

I think what we have now is the result of balancing the various trade-offs, and it's not too bad. If someone comes up with an improvement, that will be great, but I don't have any suggestions right at the moment.

It depends on how fast you can run.

what about gays?

Your original question was, "If marriage did not exist, would you invent it?". I wouldn't invent it for gays, but I would invent it in an attempt to provide a stable home environment for raising kids.

As for the rest of your comment, maybe a marriage isn't necessary for deciding what to do with the kids, which is probably good since a lot of kids are born out of wedlock. However, I still think that if two people are planning on having kids, they should formalize their commitment to raising the kids, and having it be something cultural, like marriage, strengthens the commitment.

I'm saying that a stable marriage is essential for raising children. You can still get married without having children, but it isn't necessary, and it may not even be desirable. The question here is: "If marriage did not exist, would you invent it?", I'm saying that one reason to invent it would be to provide a stable family for raising kids.