Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2002 08:56:56 -0500
From: "Charles Reed" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Those chems

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> . . . Take two animals descended from a common ancestor as relatively
> recently as us and a squirrel, cat, or (especially) chimp, and
> demonstrate (as is easily done) not only that they behave similarly
> under circumstances we would describe using emotional words, but (more
> difficult but it has been done) that the same regions of the brain are
> firing -- for emotions do _not_ fire primarily in the uniquely human
> areas of the cortex but in the deeper and older regions of the brain,
> shared with our fellow vertibrates -- _and_ that similar chemicals
> flood their systems at those times -- demonstrate all this, I say, and
> a claim that they do _not_ experience something very close to our
> emotions is not a least hypothesis at all, at all, but a highly
> motivated claim intended to make it okay to treat animals as we far
> too often do.

This is off-topic and trivial beyond belief, but I'd just like to
express my admiration for the above sentence.  My seventh-grade English
teacher would love to see it diagrammed.  :-)

Charles


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