Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Dr Michael Shermer at Butler University. I became aware of the lecture at the very last minute. Castor, Sara with no 'h', and I jumped in the car and made a B-Line for Indy. Castor even called off work to attend. This probably represents the first time in history that a Taco Bell employee has skipped work to see a science lecture.

The title of the lecture was The Science of Good and Evil which is of course the title of one of Dr Shermer's more recent books. He first established morality (in the form of reciprocal altruism) as a helpful evolutionary development for social animals as one would expect. However I found his next step of constructing a moral system that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative interesting. He proposes a provisional morality, based on science yet flexible enough to take human diversity and varied contexts into account. I suppose that I had fallen for the false dichotomy that one is either a moral-absolutist or a moral-relativist. This certainly gives me something to think about.