No, too many college classes

No, elijah probably got that way the same way many people got that way. He probably took some of the same courses in college that I took. Probably psychology, but possibly psychiatry or sociology, or even anthropology.

I don't pretend to believe that everything I was taught in college was correct. If I had had any doubt, I learned that the day that I had a psychiatry, sociology, and then psychology professor all discuss the same theory of Freud's. It was obvious that at most one professor could be correct, and it was obvious that there was no way I could keep their opinions straight in my mind if they asked about it on a test. Personally, I thought that all three were wrong.

I also thought that the learning theory course I took in psychology could better have been called "a history of learning theories known to be incorrect."

Nonetheless, once you get through the statistics courses, and start to understand things better, you understand that the psychologists and sociologists, at least, have hard evidence behind what they are saying, as long as you read the papers they have written in their entirety. The conclusions, on the other hand, are a lot more suspect.

Of course the kind of thing elijah is talking about doesn't explain all of human behavior, but it certainly influences it. Such studies usually find that the factor being studied explains some percentage of the resulting behavior. This is not at all the "clockwork person" you alluded to. If people were that way, such studies would explain 100% of behavior in a given situation, where the actual percentage is much lower.

Suppose, for example, running a particular nationwide TV commercial results in $10 million in new business. That's only a few cents per person; the commercial obviously explained only a tiny part of the resulting human behavior. Still, it altered enough behavior to be profitable.

Likewise, even small changes in mating behavior can have significant effects over generations. Consider peacock tails.

Elijah says lots of things that I disagree with, and a fair number that I agree with, but I don't think that he does a very good job of presenting his views to a hostile audience.

One thing that I find people continually ignore is that as a person gets sexually aroused, they get less rational. It isn't the logical part of your brain controlling your behavior at that point. Remember that a human brain is built on top of an mamillian brain that has at its core a reptilian brain. A lot of sexual behavior is based on chemicals in the brain, not just on nervous system activity.

If you think that I'm wrong, just try a simple experiment. If you're like most of us, you can think of something that you have wanted to try during sex, and don't know why you haven't. Decide to try it tonight, keep it in your mind, and note when you change your mind. For me, it is usually about 20 seconds before climax.

When women refer to some man as an animal, the description is usually accurate. We all lose a lot of control near the end. The "animal" just loses it a lot earlier.