AndrewB

It's interesting that the human race has been around for 200 thousand years or something along those lines. But it was just in the last few hundred years that people stopped burning witches and slavery was abolished. It was in the last century that women were officially considered people, just like men.

Obviously society has evolved quite a bit in the last few hundred years. But is it really evolution? After all, evolution is an improvement process that spans over millions of years, not hundreds, so I doubt it.

So what has happened over the past few hundred years to cause this blossoming of morality? I'll tell you what has happened: Medical science.

Before modern medicine, childbirth was a gravely dangerous process. It was common for women to die, and the chance of the baby surviving was practically a coin toss. Even when a childbirth was successful, brain damage was common. Oxygen deprivation during birth is the #1 cause of permanent brain damage; the kind that leads to mental retardedness and growth deformities.

With the surface of modern hospitals and childbirth administered by trained professionals, brain damage has been reduced dramatically.

But is this true throughout the world? Not at all. A significant portion of the world is too impoverished to have access to what we consider "modern medicine." This just happens to be areas such as South America, Asia, and most of Africa, which (not coincidentally) are hotbeds for terrorism and religious extremism.

To summarize, people murder because of brain damage, and that damage is caused by birth complications. The more we can advance medical science, the better the world will be.