I went to see The Cure Friday evening at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise Florida and the show was outstanding.  The Cure have been around for 30 years now….hard to believe, isn't it?  Although I heard the early stuff, I did not get heavily "in" to them until Pornography and The Head On The Door.  I first saw The Cure during the Kissing Tour in 1987 on a road trip to New Orleans; I have not missed a tour since.  Up to this week, I felt their best tour was 1989's Disintegration Tour…the current tour blew it away.

Since their new album will not be out until the fall, the band hit Florida Friday night as a foursome.  Just two guitars, bass and drums…no keyboards! It was incredibly interesting to hear the arrangements played on guitars, changing the audio flavor of some of the older tracks.  With a mesmerizing high tech light show in constant motion, the three plus hour setlist (with four encores!) was full of fan favorites and obscure tracks…with only a couple of brand new songs.

We had amazing seats and the crowd was totally into it, there was not an empty seat in the house!  (I must mention the opening act, 65daysofstatic, a post-rock instrumental band from England.  Although they only played for 30 minutes, they are worth investigating.  And they said they will remember us for our oranges.  LOL)

 From what I could tell, the band will continue for years!

13.06.2008 Sunrise, FL - BankAtlantic Center

Plainsong, Prayers For Rain, alt.end, A Night Like This, The Baby Screams, The End Of The World, Lovesong, A Letter To Elise, Want, Pictures Of You, Lullaby, Maybe Someday, The Perfect Boy, From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, Sleep When I'm Dead, Push, Friday I'm In Love, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, Primary, Never Enough, The Only One, Signal To Noise, One Hundred Years, Disintegration

ENCORE 1: If Only Tonight We Could Sleep, The Kiss
ENCORE 2: Freakshow, Close To Me, Why Can't I Be You?
ENCORE 3: Boys Don't Cry, Jumping Someone Else's Train, Grinding Halt, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing An Arab
ENCORE 4: A Forest

You have to love the irony of that headline!

Here is the story, from www.newscientist.com

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

"If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community," says James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, who wrote the program – called Evogod (download the code here).

Dow is by no means the first scientist to take a stab at explaining how religion emerged. Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that religion is a mental artefact, co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.

Aiding the people

Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious.

"Sometime between 100,000 years ago to the point where writing was invented, maybe about 7000 BC, we begin to have records of people's supernatural beliefs," Dow says.

To determine if it was possible for religion to emerge as an adaptation, Dow wrote a simple computer program that focuses on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.

"What people are adapting to is other people," he says.

Religious attraction

To simplify matters, Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

Ancient needs

Richard Sosis, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, US, says the model adds a new dimension to the debate over how religion could have evolved, which has previously relied on verbal arguments and speculation. But "these are baby steps", he cautions.

Sosis previously found that in some populations – kibbutzim in Israel, for instance – more religious people receive more assistance from others than the less faithful. But he notes that the forces that maintain religion in modern humans could be very different from those that promoted its emergence, thousands of years ago.

Palaeolithic humans were probably far more reliant than modern humans on the community they were born into, Sosis says. "[Now] you can be a Lutheran one week and decide the following week you are going to become a Buddhist."

Journal reference: Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Stimulation, vol 11, p 2

Food for thought.....

In other very interesting news, from www.yahoo.com:

Mars lander to get arm-moving order a day late

We live is very interesting times, don't we?  [;-)