I'm always a lttle bit wary of proponents of evolutionary psychology. But that's Dawkin's fault, basically, for being such a pompous ass. It's an interesting field.
I watched the vid and was surprised and disappointed that it wasn't really about Evolutionary psychology.
I was curious to notice that when asked about whether we live in "dangerous times" his answer was totally focussed on people directly and deliberately killing each other, as in war, as if that's the only danger humans face. I instantly thought about environmental disasters such as tsunamis; economic threats such as danger of homelessness/starvation/hypothermia due to loss of income ; danger to health from environmental toxins...
No, I'm not saying that if you assess all these dangers and add them together, you'll concude that we do, indeed live in comparatively dangerous times. It's just curious that his concept of "danger" is so narrow.
For a lot of people, it's the very rational prospect of those environmental and economic dangers getting worse and worse that leads us to feel that we're living in dangerous times. Plus the incalculable threat of increasing technologogical advances, of course. Modern man has learned that new advances mean new ways to kill people en mass, and that there's no assessing that particular danger until somebody , somewhere decides to unleash it.
He mentioned the Cuban missile crisis as an example of how life was more dangerous in the 20th Century. Poor example. I'd say that the Cuban Missile Crisis is part of a chain of historic events that's inevitably led to modern's man's all-too-rational sense of insecurity.
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