Darwinist
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- discipler0
open your eyes, dobs. Who started this thread? Who bumped it?
Not me.
- discipler0
What good is half a feather, Dr. Dawkins?
For that matter... half a heart? Or, half an eyeball?
How does a mindless, purposeless natural mechanism have the forethought to build such amazingly complex organs? How many millions of years passed when only half-hearts and half-eyeballs existed, Dr. Dawkins? How did such mutations occur on the biochemical level, when the irreducibly complex core molecules needed all their parts simultaneously to function?
- mrdobolina0
any... politics effects us all, this stuff, frankly doesn't.
- KuzII0
another article from the economists fantastic christmas special on human evolution (the economist being the best selling weekly publication in the whole entire world):---------------
THE eruption of Toba marked the beginning rather than the end of hostilities between Homo sapiens and the climate. Views differ about whether the eruption was the trigger, but it is clear that an ice age started shortly afterwards. Though the species spread throughout Asia, Australia and Europe (the populating of the Americas is believed by most researchers to have happened after the ice began to retreat, although not everybody agrees), it was constrained by ecological circumstances in much the same way as any other animal. The world's population 10,000 years ago was probably about 5m—a long way from the imperial 6-billion-strong species that bestrides the globe today.
The killer application that led to humanity's rise is easy to identify. It is agriculture. When the glaciers began to melt and the climate to improve, several groups learned how to grow crops and domesticate animals. Once they had done that, there was no going back. Agriculture enabled man to shape his environment in a way no species had done before.
AdvertisementIn truth, agriculture turned out to be a Faustian bargain. Both modern and fossil evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers led longer, healthier and more leisured lives than did farmers until less than a century ago. But farmers have numbers on their side. And numbers beget numbers, which in turn beget cities. The path from Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, the oldest known town, to the streets of Manhattan is but a short one, and the lives of people today, no matter how urbane and civilised, are shaped in large measure by the necessities of their evolutionary past.
That fact has, however, only recently begun to be widely recognised. For many years, psychology, like anthropology, operated in a strange intellectual vacuum. Psychologists did not deny man's evolutionary past, but they did not truly acknowledge it, either. Many in the field seemed to feel that humanity had somehow transcended evolution. Indeed, those of a Marxist inclination more or less required that to be true. How else could people be perfectible? Dissenters were usually treated with disdain. But, at about the time that Dr Cann was publishing the work that would expose the fallacy of multiregionalism, a group who dubbed themselves “evolutionary psychologists” began to stick their heads above the academic parapets.
Eve's psycheStudying the behaviour of humans is more difficult than studying that of other animals, for two reasons. One is that the students come from the same species as the studied, which both reduces their objectivity and causes them to take certain things for granted, or even fail to notice them altogether. The other is that human culture is, indeed, far more complex than the cultures of other species. There is nothing wrong with studying that culture, of course. It is endlessly fascinating. But it is wrong to assume that it is the cause of human nature, rather than a consequence; that is akin to mistaking the decorative finishes of a building for the underlying civil engineering. The aim of evolutionary psychology is to try to detect the Darwinian fabric through the cultural decoration, by asking basic questions.
Many of those questions, naturally, address sensitive issues of sex and violence—another reason evolutionary psychologists are not universally popular. David Buss, of the University of Texas, demonstrated experimentally what most people know intuitively—that women value high status in a mate in a way that men do not. Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, has dissected the evolutionary factors that cause marriages to succeed or fail. She thinks, for example, that the tendency of females to prefer high-status mates is at odds with the increasing economic independence of women in the modern world. Laura Betzig, of the University of Michigan, put an explicitly Darwinian spin on the tendency of powerful men to accumulate harems.
Randy Thornhill, of the University of New Mexico, has shown that physical beauty is far from being in the eye of the beholder. In fact, those features rated beautiful, most notably bodily symmetry, are good predictors of healthy, desirable attributes such as strong immune systems—in other words, aesthetic sensibilities have evolutionary roots.
Karl Grammer, of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Urban Ethology, in Vienna, has shown that body odour, too, is correlated with symmetry and linked to immunological strength. Dr Thornhill, meanwhile, has raised quite a few hackles by arguing that a propensity to rape is an evolved characteristic of men rather than a pathology. Even murder has not escaped the attention of the evolutionary psychologists. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, showed that adults are far more likely to kill their stepchildren than their biological children—a fact that had escaped both police forces and sociologists around the world. They then dared to propose a Darwinian explanation for this, namely that step-parents have no direct interest (in the evolutionary sense) in the welfare of stepchildren.
However, something similar to this list of human behaviours that have yielded to evolutionary psychology could be found in many species. Indeed, it was often comparisons with other species that sparked the investigations in the first place. The males of many other species gather harems, but females rarely do so; female swallows prefer their mates to have symmetrical tails and they are also more faithful to high-status males; both male lions and male baboons kill the infants of females in groups they have just taken over; and so on. Where evolutionary explanations of behaviour become really interesting is when they home in on what is unique to humanity.
Playing games with the truthOne uniquely human characteristic is the playing of games with formal rules. Evolutionary psychology has not yet sought to explain this, but it has exploited it extensively to develop and test its ideas. In their different ways, the games devised by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Robert Axelrod, of the University of Michigan, have underpinned that part of evolutionary psychology devoted to uniquely human behaviour. For not all games are about competition. Many also require trust, a sense of justice and sometimes self-denial.
Cases of animals apparently making sacrifices, occasionally of their own lives, to help others are not rare in nature, but at first sight they are surprising. What is in it for the sacrificer? The usual answer, worked out in the 1960s by William Hamilton, is that the beneficiary is a relative whose reproductive output serves to carry genes found in the sacrificer into the next generation, albeit at one remove. Translated into human terms, this is good old-fashioned nepotism. In a few species, though—mankind being the most obvious—people will make sacrifices for non-relatives, or “friends”. The assumption is that the favour will be paid back at some time in the future. The question is, how can the sacrificer be sure that will happen?
Dr Axelrod used a branch of maths called game theory to come up with at least part of the answer. He showed mathematically that as long as you can recognise and remember your fellow creatures, it makes sense to follow the proverb “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” and trust them provided they don't cheat you. (Sometimes in science it is necessary to prove the obvious before you go on to the less obvious.) Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby used a different sort of game to show that humans are thus, as Dr Axelrod's model suggests they should be, acutely sensitive to unfair treatment. They did this by presenting some problems of formal logic to their experimental subjects as a card game. When the problems were presented using cards with letters and numbers on opposite faces, and the subjects had to work out which cards needed to be turned over to yield the required answers, people found them hard to do and more often than not got them wrong. However, when the problems were presented in a form that required the subjects to decide whether people were being treated fairly or not, they found them really easy. The researchers' conclusion is that humans are hard-wired not for logic but for detecting injustice.
Trust, and the detection and punishment of injustice, lie at the heart of human society. They are so important that people will actually harm their own short-term interests to punish those they regard as behaving unfairly. Another game, for example, involves two people dividing a sum of money ($100, say). One makes the division and the other accepts or rejects it. If it is rejected, neither player gets any money. On the face of it, even a 99:1 division should be accepted, since the second player will be one dollar better off. In practice, though, few people will accept less than a 70:30 split. They will prefer to punish the divider's greed rather than take a small benefit themselves.
This makes no sense in a one-off transaction, but makes every sense if the two participants are likely to deal with each other repeatedly. And that, before the agricultural population boom (and also, for the most part, after it) was the normal state of affairs. The people an individual dealt with routinely would have been the members of his circle of 150. Strangers would have been admitted to this circle only after prolonged vetting. Such bonds of trust, described by Matt Ridley, a science writer, as “the origins of virtue” in his book of that name, underlie the exchanges of goods and services that are the basis of economics. They may also, though, underlie another sensitive subject that social scientists do not like biologists treading on: race.
Robert Kurzban, a colleague of Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby, took the racial bull by the horns by reversing the old saw about beauty. Dr Thornhill's work overturned the folk wisdom that beauty is in the beholder's eye by showing that universal standards of beauty have evolved, and there are good reasons for them. Dr Kurzban, by contrast, thinks he has shown that race really does exist only in the eye—or, rather, the mind—of the beholder, not the biology of the person being beheld, and does so for good Darwinian reasons.
First impressions countDr Kurzban observes that the three criteria on which people routinely, and often prejudicially, assess each other are sex, age and race. Judgments based on sex and age make Darwinian sense, because people have evolved in a context where these things matter. But until long-distance transport was invented, few people would have come across members of other races. Dr Kurzban believes that perceptions of racial difference are caused by the overstimulation of what might be called an “otherness detector” in the human mind. This is there to sort genuine strangers, who will need to work hard to prove they are trustworthy, from those who are merely unfamiliar members of the clan. It will latch on to anything unusual and obvious—and there is little that is more obvious than skin colour. But other things, such as an odd accent, will do equally well. Indeed, Dr Dunbar thinks that the speed with which accents evolve demonstrates that they are used in precisely this sort of way.
If Dr Kurzban is right (and experiments he has done suggest that assessments of allegiance are easily “rebadged” away from skin colour by recognisable tokens such as coloured T-shirts, as any sports fan could probably have told him), it explains why race-perception is such a powerful social force, even though geneticists have failed to find anything in humans that would pass muster as geographical races in any other species. In fact, one of the striking things about Homo sapiens compared with, say, the chimpanzee is the genetic uniformity of the species. The only “racial” difference that has a well-established function is skin colour. This balances the need to protect the skin from damage by ultraviolet light (which requires melanin, the pigment that makes skin dark) and the need to make vitamin D (which results from the action of sunlight on a chemical in the skin). This explains dark, opaque skins in the tropics and light, transparent ones nearer the poles. The test is that dark-skinned arctic dwellers, such as the Inuit of North America, have diets rich in vitamin D, and so do not need to make it internally. As to other physical differences, they may be the result of founder effects, as described by Dr Ambrose, or possibly of sexual selection, which can sometimes pick up and amplify arbitrary features.
Darwinian thinking can lead in other unexpected directions, too. Pursue Dr Buss's observation about women preferring high-status males to its logical conclusion, and you have a plausible explanation for the open-endedness of economic growth. Psychologists of a non-evolutionary bent sometimes profess themselves puzzled by the fact that once societies leave penury behind (the cited income level varies, but $10,000 per person per year seems about the mark), they do not seem to get happier as they get richer.
That may be because incomes above a certain level are as much about status as about material well-being. Particularly if you are a man, status buys the best mates, and frequently more of them. But status is always relative. It does not matter how much you earn if the rest of your clan earn more. People (and men, in particular) are always looking for ways to enhance their status—and a good income is an excellent way of doing so. Aristotle Onassis, a man who knew a thing or two about both wealth and women, once said: “If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” Perhaps the founding father of economics is not really Adam Smith, who merely explained how to get rich, but Charles Darwin, who helped to explain why.
- mrdobolina0
start a design-related thread... ONCE!
- discipler0
go start a politics thread, mrdobs. ;)
- mrdobolina0
your one-track mind is similar to psychosis.
- discipler0
http://www.uncommondescent.com/i…
Pay particular attention to the last few seconds here:
http://www.arn.org/docs/dawkins.…
Then listen to this:
- discipler0
"Over the next 300,000 years these apes evolved an upright stance. No one know for sure why..."
--- It's a combination of circular reasoning and just-so stories.
In reality, all they have is empty speculation since there is not a shred of actual scientific evidence that species to species macro-evolution occurred. The empirical evidence would point away from Homo Sapien common ancestry with hominids, when time-frames are considered and NS + RM's inability to produce beneficial information-gaining mutations, are considered. We are left with a fossil record that essentially shows 2 things:
- Sudden appearance of fully formed body & tissue plans.
- Fully formed animal and homo sapien species without true intermediates.
Additionally, on the biochemical level, we have no pathway from an existing species to a novel species.
Macro-evolution is about force-fitting the evidence into a philosophical paradigm.
- mrdobolina0
you pump waaaaaaaay too much voltage through this whole ID thing, you need a hobby.
- mrdobolina0
Atheistic Materialism is not an organized thing. Give it a rest dude.
- KuzII0
yeah, can't wait for that show. looks really interesting and exciting. definitly worth staying in for on a monday night.
- JazX0
Kelpernicus sees the stars and he knows all
- discipler0
From the Channel 4 overview:
" Dawkins takes a personal journey through the world’s three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam."
--- So a zoologist and avowed atheist is going to tell us about world religions? Interesting.
"In the light of overwhelming scientific evidence that, he believes, shows a supreme being cannot exist"
--- What does Dr. Dawkins say about the overwhelming evidence that demonstrates that a supreme being must exist?
"Dawkins argues that for the good of humanity, religion needs to be challenged and disproved. "
--- For the "good" of humanity? How can Dawkins establish a standard for "good" when he says there is no God? To be consistent, "good" is just illusory, by his world view.
"Ultimately he asks how they can defend what religion has done, and is doing to us?"
--- Is he going to talk about the evil that has been done under the banner of Atheistic Materialism? And how it dwarfs the centuries of prior religious conflict, in the realm of evil.
Is he going to also review the countless transformed lives, abandoned addictions, restored families, personal contentment, selfless acts, missionary aid relief, etc... etc... that religious faith has produced?
I've been bored of Dawkins for quite some time now. *Note how miserable he looks in the picture. ;)
- KuzII0
'ere you go kelpernicus. Sans graphs and tings:------------
THANKS to Dr Cann and her successors, the story of how Homo sapiens spread throughout the world is getting clearer by the day. But why did it happen? What was it that gave the species its edge, and where did it come from? Here, the picture blurs.
Until recently, it was common to speak of an Upper Palaeolithic revolution in human affairs—what Jared Diamond, of the University of California at Los Angeles, called the Great Leap Forward. Around 40,000 years ago, so the argument ran, humanity underwent a mental step-change. The main evidence for this was the luxuriant cave art that appeared in Europe shortly after this time. Palaeopsychologists see this art as evidence that the artists could manipulate abstract mental symbols—and so they surely could. But it is a false conclusion (though it was widely drawn before Dr Cann's work) that this mental power actually evolved in Europe. Since all humans can paint (some, admittedly, better than others), the mental ability to do so, if not the actual technique, must have emerged in Africa before the first emigrants left. Indeed, evidence of early artistic leanings in that continent has now turned up in the form of drilled beads made of shells and coral, and—more controversially—of stones that have abstract patterns scratched on to them and bear traces of pigment.
AdvertisementThat certainly pushes the revolution back a few tens of millennia. The oldest beads seem to date from 75,000 years ago, and an inspired piece of lateral thinking suggests that clothing appeared at about the same time. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, applied the molecular-clock technique to human lice. They showed that head lice and body lice diverged 75,000 years ago. Since body lice live in clothing, and most other species of mammal support only one species of louse, the inference is that body lice evolved at the same time as clothes.
That is an interesting coincidence, and some think it doubly interesting that it coincides with the eruption of Toba. It may be evidence of a shift of thought patterns of the sort that the Upper Palaeolithic revolutionaries propose. On the other hand, there are also signs of intellectual shifts predating this period. Sally McBrearty, of the University of Connecticut, and Alison Brooks, of George Washington University, have identified 14 traits, from making stone blades to painting images, which they think represent important conceptual advances. Ten of them, including fishing, mining, engaging in long-distance trade and making bone tools, as well as painting and making beads, seem to be unique to modern Homo sapiens. However, four, including grinding pigments (for what purpose remains unknown, but probably body painting), stretch back into the debatable past of Homo helmei.
Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence from Africa, which has not been explored with the same sort of archaeological fine-tooth comb as Europe, the speed of the emergence of modern behaviour is still debatable. One thing, however, that clearly played no part in distinguishing Homo sapiens from his hominid contemporaries was a bigger brain.
Modern people do, indeed, have exceedingly large brains, measuring about 1,300 cm³. Other mammals that weigh roughly the same as human beings—sheep, for example—have brains with an average volume of 180cm³. In general, there is a well-established relationship between body size and brain size that people very much do not fit. But as Dr Oppenheimer shows (see chart 2), most of this brain expansion happened early in human evolutionary history, in Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The brains of modern people are only about 6% larger than those of their immediate African predecessors. Perhaps more surprisingly, they are smaller than those of Neanderthals. There is no doubt that this early brain growth set the scene for what subsequently happened to Homo sapiens, but it does not explain the whole story, otherwise Homo erectus would have built cities and flown to the moon.
Flying to the moon may, in fact, be an apt analogy. Just as a space rocket needs several stages to lift it into orbit, so the growth of human intelligence was probably a multi-stage process, with each booster having its own cause or causes. What those causes were, and when they operated, remains a matter of vehement academic dispute. But there are several plausible hypotheses.
The most obvious idea—that being clever helps people to survive by learning about their surroundings and being able to solve practical problems—is actually the least favoured explanation, at least as the cause of the Great Leap Forward. But it was probably how intelligence got going in the pre-human primate past, and thus represented the first stage of the rocket.
Many primates, monkeys in particular, are fruit-eaters. Eating fruit is mentally taxing in two ways. The first is that fruiting trees are patchily distributed in both space and time (though in the tropics, where almost all monkeys live, there are always trees in fruit somewhere). An individual tree will provide a bonanza, but you have to find it at the right moment. Animals with a good memory for which trees are where, and when they last came into fruit, are likely to do better than those who rely on chance. Also, fruit (which are a rare example of something that actually wants to be eaten, so that the seeds inside will be scattered) signal to their consumers when they are ready to munch by changing colour. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that primates have better colour vision than most other mammals. But that, too, is heavy on the brain. The size of the visual cortex in a monkey brain helps to explain why monkeys have larger brains than their weight seems to warrant.
The intelligence rocket's second stage was almost certainly a way of dealing with the groups that fruit-eating brought into existence. Because trees in the tropics come into fruit at random, an animal needs a lot of fruit trees in its range if it is to avoid starving. Such a large range is difficult for a lone animal to defend. On the other hand, a tree in fruit can feed a whole troop. For both these reasons, fruit-eating primates tend to live in groups.
But if you have to live in a group, you might as well make the most of it. That means avoiding conflict with your rivals and collaborating with your friends—which, in turn, means keeping track of your fellow critters to know who is your enemy and who your ally. That, in turn, demands a lot of brain power.
One of the leading proponents of this sort of explanation for intelligent minds is Robin Dunbar, of Liverpool University in England. A few years ago, he showed that the size of a primate's brain, adjusted for the size of its body, is directly related to the size of group it lives in. (Subsequent work has shown that the same relationship holds true for other social mammals, such as wolves and their kin.) Humans, with the biggest brain/body ratio of all, tend to live in groups of about 150. That is the size of a clan of hunter-gathers. Although the members of such a clan meet only from time to time, since individual families forage separately, they all agree on who they are. Indeed, as Dr Dunbar and several other researchers have noticed, many organisations in the modern world, such as villages and infantry companies, are about this size.
Living in collaborative groups certainly brings advantages, and those may well offset the expense of growing and maintaining a large brain. But even more advantage can be gained if an animal can manipulate the behaviour of others, a phenomenon dubbed Machiavellian intelligence by Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne, of the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Size isn't everythingMonkeys and apes manage this to a certain extent. They seem to have a limited “theory of mind”—the ability to work out what others are thinking—which is an obvious prerequisite for the would-be simian politician. They also engage in behaviour which, to the cynical human zoologist, looks suspiciously like lying. But it is those two words, “cynical” and “suspiciously”, that give the game away. For it is humans themselves, with their ability to ponder not only what others are thinking, but also what those others are thinking about them, who are the past masters of such manipulation.
And it is here that the question of language enters the equation. Truly Machiavellian manipulation is impossible without it. And despite claims for talking chimpanzees, parrots and dolphins, real language—the sort with complex grammar and syntax—is unique to Homo sapiens.
Dr Dunbar's hypothesis is that language arose as a substitute for the physical grooming that other group-living primates use to maintain bonds of friendship. Conversation—or gossip, as he refers to it—certainly does seem to have the same bond-forming role as grooming. And, crucially for the theory, groups rather than just pairs can “groom” each other this way. Dr Dunbar sees the 150-strong group size of Homo sapiens as both a consequence and a cause of verbal grooming, with large groups stimulating the emergence of language, and language then permitting the emergence of larger groups still. Language, therefore, is the result of a process of positive feedback.
Once established, it can be deployed for secondary purposes. Furthering the Machiavellian ends outlined by Dr Whiten and Dr Byrne would be one such purpose, and this would drive other feedback loops as people evolve more and more elaborate theories of mind in order to manipulate and avoid manipulation. But language would also promote collaborative activities such as trade and the construction of sophisticated artefacts by allowing specialisation and division of labour.
Not everyone agrees with the details of this thesis, but the idea that the evolution of mental powers such as language has been driven by two-way feedback loops rather than one-way responses to the environment is a powerful one. Terrence Deacon, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, thinks that language evolved in a feedback loop with the complex culture that it allowed humans to create. Changes in culture alter and complicate the environment. Natural selection causes evolutionary changes that give people the means to exploit their new, more complex circumstances. That makes the cultural environment still more complicated. And so on. Dr Deacon believes this process has driven the capacity for abstract thought that accounts for much of what is referred to as intelligence. He sees it building up gradually in early hominids, and then taking off spectacularly in Homo sapiens.
The peacock mindPerhaps the most intriguing hypothesis about the last stage of the mental-evolution rocket, though, is an idea dreamed up by Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico. He thinks that the human mind is like a peacock's tail, a luxuriant demonstration of its owner's genetic fitness.
At first sight this idea seems extraordinary, but closer examination suggests it is disturbingly plausible. Lots of features displayed by animals are there to show off to the opposite sex. Again, this involves a feedback loop. As the feature becomes more pronounced, the judge becomes more demanding until the cost to the displayer balances the average reproductive benefit.
Frequently, only one sex (usually the male) does the showing off. That makes the sexually selected feature obvious, because it is absent in the other sex. Dr Miller, though, argues that biologists have underplayed the extent to which females show off to males, particularly in species such as songbirds where the male plays a big part in raising the young, and so needs to be choosy about whom he sets up home with. Like male birds, male humans are heavily involved in childrearing, so if the mind is an organ for showing off, both sexes would be expected to possess it—and be attracted by it—in more or less equal measure.
Dr Miller suggests that many human mental attributes evolved this way—rather too many, according to some of his critics, who think that he has taken an interesting idea to implausible extremes. But sexual selection does provide a satisfying explanation for such otherwise perplexing activities as painting, carving, singing and dancing. On the surface, all of these things look like useless dissipations of energy. All, however, serve to demonstrate physical and mental prowess in ways that are easy to see and hard to fake—precisely the properties, in fact, that are characteristic of sexually selected features. Indeed, a little introspection may suggest to the reader that he or she has, from time to time, done some of these things to show off to a desirable sexual partner.
Crucially, language, too, may have been driven by sexual selection. No doubt Machiavelli played his part: rhetoric is a powerful political skill. But seduction relies on language as well, and encourages some of the most florid speech of all. Nor, in Dr Miller's view of the world, is the ability to make useful things exempt from sexual selection. Well-made artefacts as much as artful decorations indicate good hand-eye co-ordination and imagination.
Whether Dr Miller's mental peacock tails have an underlying unity is unclear. It could be the ability to process symbols; or it could be that several different abilities have evolved independently under a single evolutionary pressure—the scrutiny of the opposite sex. Or it could be that sexual selection is not the reason after all, or at least not the main part of it. But it provides a plausible explanation for modern humanity's failure to interbreed with its Neanderthal contemporaries, whether or not such unions would have been fertile: they just didn't fancy them.
- skt0
more of a proposition than an offer...
- paraselene0
there's no such thing as international lawmen, debtor's prison or transatlantic credit ratings. if any or all of those things existed, it might not be an amusing situation. however, i think it is. that might be a bit dark of me though...
cheers for the offer, anyway.
:)
- kelpie0
thumbs up :)
- KuzII0
"decided to place my faith in your inability to let anything slide ever ;)"
hahaha! that is so me that is! i never just let things go!
i'll post the other articles on evolution post haste!
- kelpie0
hey, I'm back - cheers for posting that Kuz, I was going to buy it last night but decided to place my faith in your inability to let anything slide ever ;)
please post the rest, please.
Para: I know a safe house in Renfrewshire if you need it. Oh damn I just said where it was. bugger. best of luck fighting the international lawmen. Don't go on any unmarked planes with guys in black suits and shades