Lucky us.

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has written a slew of fascinating books about evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, including How The Mind Works, The Language Instinct, andThe Blank Slate. At the recent TED Conference, Pinker shifted his sights to the evolution of violence. Forget the romantic notion of the noble savage, he says. A deep look at the history of violence seems to reveal that modern culture may be making us less violent over time, not more. "Today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth," Pinker says. The latest edition of the fantasticEdgenewsletter includes an essay Pinker wrote based on his talk. It originally appeared in the New Republic. From the essay:

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

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But the "Two months?" questions are still baffling -- she's tiny, but at going on 13 surely not as tiny as your average 2-monther?

You know, I think Lillian was about her age when someone asked me if she was that age. At the time, my petite daughter was totally average. 50% in everything but head size, where she was 70%.

Because all baby girls everywhere are born with long lustrous locks, and the ones who aren't have the good sense to go around with little frilly headbands on their bald little heads. Any unadorned bald head must belong to a boy (

Boo had a lot of hair. Boo, when wearing dresses, was still often mistaken for male.

My way figuring out if a baby is a boy or a girl is to look right at the baby and say, "You're so cute. What's your name?" and when the parents answer, I usually know if the baby is a boy or a girl.

My way figuring out if a baby is a boy or a girl is to look right at the baby and say, "You're so cute. What's your name?" and when the parents answer, I usally know if the baby is a boy or a girl.

Unless, of course, they reply "Pat."

Unless, of course, they reply "Pat."

Yeah, that's why I said usally. Some names can be tricky.

Sara had very little hair until about eight months, and even though we always dressed her as the girliest girl in Girldonia, people were always mistaking her for a boy. I don't get it. I don't know anyone who would dress their little guy in a *dress* with daisies on it.

Boo had a lot of hair. Boo, when wearing dresses, was still often mistaken for male.

When wearing dresses. See how stupid people are, JZ?

(I think Ben was 12 or something pounds at 2 mos., so I can't help you there.)

Unless, of course, they reply "Pat."

Ha!!!!!

JZ, I did not mean to imply that M is a freakazoid gargantuan baby. She IS very tiny and delicate, but still, BIG compared to the barely out of the birth canal pictures, which were the last I saw.

Driveby:

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I have found that people often guess the wrong gender of boys as well as girls, and that it doesn't end once the kid is a toddler. I don't mind, and so far, neither do the kids.