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The human hand is a weapon, not for hunting but for quick head blows to other humans. Apes and chimps cannot form a tight weapon fist like we can. Humans were engineered for walking long distances while carrying a weapon. Running is what humans do if they forget their weapon. Kenyan running ability is likely an adaptation for outrunning a tribal warfare attack and little to do with putting food on the table.

You've definitely spent time in a leftist echo chamber and I'm not going to get far in countering that. I'd like to try to impart more respect for the benefits of religion, even though it's not for you. Here's a more scholarly write up that it explains it better than I can and there are many others you could look up: Why Religion Matters Even More: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability

Although poor people tend to be poor from low IQ they are not religious because of low IQ but because they benefit more from it. Correlation is not causation.

Team sports are really practice tribal warfare, not just for those on the field but for the spectators/civilians as well. You can see that most clearly in American football where the teams often use Indian tribe names. Soccer was invented by the British so their colonies wouldn't practice more violent sports making them tougher opponents in battle. Soccer mainly teaches subjects how to throw down their arms and run for their lives. American professional football teams are often very religious because it imparts competitive advantages such as not giving up when the odds are long. Tim Tebow is famous for amazing comebacks that beat the odds, sometimes at least, despite his average athletic ability. When adjusted for other factors, Catholic schools mysteriously outperform in many sports compared to public schools.

Most leaps in technology are funded by military spending. For example the first integrated circuit cost $1,000 each and the first order was for use in a new American jet bomber. That created a market that eventually led to ICs costing pennies. Military spending drives the "cutting edge" of technology. Look at all through breakthroughs that came from WWII. We're still riding that wave. The wealth of a nation is largely driven by military spending 20 years prior. Today the military is investing heavily in robotics, an important technology that might keep America from going bankrupt from socialism 20 years from now. To gut military spending is to gut our future wealth, case in point: the formerly Great Britain now a socialist has-been.

Everyone is a Republican when it comes to their own paycheck. The outrage over January's payroll tax increase was most intense from Obama voters. People only become Democrats when you start talking about higher taxes on the other guy. About 50% of wealth that passes through government hands is destroyed due to the nature of the government beast. Taxes are already too progressive, taking wealth from those good at investing it, creating jobs and prosperity, and giving it to government, half to be destroyed. I hope you have plans to get a real job someday, not a government job with 3 day weekends and so much red tape you can accomplish little.

Thanks for the help; I'll remember those!

You are correct - the hand may indeed have evolutionary uses as a weapon; we obviously put it to good use in that regard at present. I was talking more specifically about it not being all about holding weapons, but tool use in general, which includes holding weapons - the use of a fist as a weapon is another story, and I'd agree, it does suit a certain pattern, though I have my doubts about it being the only influence.

I suppose I may have been mislead, and appreciate the link to the write-up on religion; I'll give it a more through read-through before I reply about it if that's ok. For what it's worth, I don't entirely like the modern "conservative = Christian" views; I think we're missing out on important demographics if we do things that way.

I get the impression that I don't really know enough about sports statistics to be able to say whether or not religious schools do better, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there. However, as you said, correlation is not causation.

Team sports as practice tribal warfare is not an uncommon view - I think the anthropologists you disparage would agree as well - indeed, I see football as a mock-up of trench warfare itself. Games, by and large, act to teach various lessons, be it strategy or craftiness or - as you suggest - not giving up at long odds. Though if I may say, I think basketball is a better example of the latter.

Dealing with military spending, I agree entirely; many great inventions were developed for military applications first, and later adapted for domestic use. However, what I must point out is that this is not so much a matter of the military being a better investment than it is about necessity. This is one part of your argument that I certainly agree with - war is motivating, a driving force, and the search for force multipliers has indeed brought about a number of advancements, especially when it comes to materials and ballistics. However, there is back-and-forth in this; in many cases, the military says "we need something that does X", and they turn to recent non-military research to get an idea of how to do that, then pour money into researching that aspect. Not only that, but to a certain extent the military can be seen as advantaged in terms of funding in a more literal sense - just for the sake of comparison, in 2012 the Department of Defense research budget was $79.1 billion, where as the National Science Foundation got $8.2 billion. But I digress.

As to paychecks, yes, absolutely! People in general have this weird notion that they're going to elect a politician who will both lower their taxes and somehow also fund all the social programs they want; it's ridiculous, and folks don't get that progressive taxes are, generally, falling onto the middle-class; the "1%" of not-too-recent fame are still very good at not paying large taxes. At the same time, while I agree that simply distributing wealth from those who are capable of producing to the government to be further distributed is a poor move, the whole idea of trickle-down economics was rather a bust as well. To be frank, solving this sort of economic conundrum may be beyond my ability, but my impression is we will benefit from less tax and less regulation in general, though there might be specific caveats and loopholes that need to be plugged before we can manage that.

And yes - I plan on working with as little red tape as I can manage, and I would love to be privately funded. Thanks for talking this out, by the by; it's been fun.