> > To me the greatest advantage of these laws was that it set the > community apart from their neighbors, as did circumcision. This > separation probably brought a lot of persecution but a lot of cohesion as > well. There is an intriguing and relevant evolutionary theory that this reminds me of. Consider the problem of introducing genetic change to a population. If the population is very large, and interbreeds essentially at random, then mutations, even favorable ones, will tend to get "damped out", and vanish before having a chance to become part of the general genome. Such a species is very stable, but less likely to be able to adapt quickly to the next environmental change. One "solution" to this, which evolution appears to have "invented", is Culture. That is, an arbitrary set of behaviours that seperates the species into small breeding pools. These pools are small enough that favorable mutations will often spread throughout the pool, rather than be damped out by widespread interbreeding. But this is only useful to the species as a whole if there is a small tendency to breed *outside* of the cultural pool also; say, one or two instances in any given generation. This allows the established-in- one-pool favorable mutations to hop over to a neighboring pool, and perhaps establish themselves there. By such hops, a truly favorable mutation can gradually spread to the whole species. This theory was originally come up with to explain observations of culture groups in lower primates. They had Culture groups based on specific patterns of behavior that seemed completely unrelated to evolutionary fitness, until seen in this larger scale of species-wide evolution. If true, this theory has some interesting implications. Language evolved as a tool for easy differentiation of Culture, not because of intelligence. And our tendency to villify (but occasionally romanticize) the Alien, is actually an expression of an evolutionary imperative that is older than the words which could explain it. [Please note that I don't think this *excuses* racial predjudice. I do think it goes a long way towards *explaining* it, however...] Alexx Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employers. alexx at carolingiaSPAMBL@CK.org http://www.panix.com/~alexx "If you achieve success, you will get applause. Enjoy it -- but never quite believe it." -- Robert Montgomery