It's no secret: We, as a species, are more vicious than the most violent of dogs. What remains perplexing is that in the millennia since Homer, and his graphic descriptions of guts and brains being spewed onto battlefields in The Odyssey, that the mechanism in our brain that continues to turn off the empathy switch remains so persistent. Remember that photo of uniformed U.S. Army reservist, petite Lynndie England, giving the thumbs-up sign to the camera, a cigarette dangling from her lips, against the backdrop of naked, male Abu Ghraib prisoners she's been assigned to guard, one being forced to masturbate for the camera. Or of her dragging another naked prisoner... More >>>