All complex beings suffer. In fact, the capacity to suffer is as good a measure of biological complexity as any, especially because visceral reactions to physical injury, conscious pain, and emotional distress are visible and measurable. The problem of other minds may prevent us from knowing what pain feels like to another being, but it does not seriously interfere with the conclusion that suff...

The evil eye belief is a widespread superstition according to which people can cause harm by a mere envious glance at coveted objects or their owners. This paper argues that such belief originated and persisted as a useful heuristic under conditions in which envy was likely to trigger destructive behavior and the avoidance of other people’s envy, effectively prescribed by the evil eye belief, w...

An estimated 27 million South Africans use indigenous medicines (Mander, 1997, Medicinal plant marketing and strategies for sustaining the plant supply in the Bushbuckridge area and Mpumalanga Province. Institute for Natural Resources, University of Natal. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa). Although herbal remedies are freely available in amayeza stores, or Xhosa chemists, for self-medication, li...

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KE VI N V AN A EL ST R OBERT GOLDBERG SAGS INTO HIS DESK CHAIR AND GESTURES AT THE AIR. “FRANKENSTEIN monsters, things crawling out of the lab,” he says. “This the most depressing thing I’ve ever dealt with.” Goldberg, a plant molecular biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is not battling psychosis. He is expressing despair at the relentless need to confront what he sees as b...

The sense of being stared at is the basis of evil eye beliefs, which are regarded as superstitions because the emission of any form of energy from the human eye has been rejected by Western science. However, brainwaves in the 1–40 Hertz, 1–10 microvolt range emitted through the eye can be detected using a high-impedance electrode housed inside electromagnetically insulated goggles. This signal,...

While a considerable secondary literature revolves around the issue of whether Marx believed that the concepts of “justice” and “injustice” – and hence, by implication, other comparable moral terms as well – had any non-relative meaning, there is really no doubt that a strong moral vision, with emphasis on the evil aspects of the capitalist system as a system of exploitation, undergirded all of...