All the ass-headed cruelty of the world will now make sense!

Hey thats great. I'm going to send that to some people.

Wow, this is news? We had to dissect a bunch of monkey brains to figure out that people don't give a **** about anyone they don't personally know? Well, gee whiz, Wally.

Hey!?!? Your right too!

My head hurts.

Hey, Amigo? ...You're in my Monkeysphere.

Yes!

We knew that people don't give a **** about anyone they don't personally know. We dissected a bunch of monkey brains and figure out that the cause of people not giving a **** about anyone they don't personally know is physiological.

The British zoologist and ethnologist Desmond Morris presented a similar idea in his book The Human Zoo, published in 1969, in which he argued the case that humans are social animals who evolved within groups the size of prehistoric, and modern indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes. But as societies evolved into larger and larger groups, tribes became cities or "super-tribes," life became much easier, but also much more unnatural. Because of this unnatural existence humans in these super-tribes exhibit many of the same neurotic and other abnormal behaviors that are found in animals that are caged in zoos, and that are absent, for the most part, in animals living in the wild, and humans living in tribes. So, he says, cities aren't concrete jungles, as they have been likened, they are instead human zoos.

InfraBlue, Very interesting.

But what good does knowing that it's physiological do? Maybe it's just me, but I always thought it was pretty obvious that humans aren't adapted to function in groups of vast numbers of people, and that that's likely why we reduce other cultures to stereotypes, think of others as cardboard cut-outs making a guest appearance in the drama of our life, etc.... This just seems like common sense to me and something that research dollars didn't need to go to. But hey, whatever floats research scientists' boats, I guess...

....oh, and just so you know, Infrablue, if you contradict me, you're so totally out of my Monkeysphere.

(okay, now I see why the author of that article seemed to be having so much fun-- the phrase "Monkeysphere" is pretty much endlessly amusing)