It's very easy to speculate about the evolutionary origins of a trait, but often very difficult to defend such speculations with evidence. Natural selection is not the only engine of evolutionary change. So there's no particular reason to think that our capacity for aesthetic pleasure is an adaptation, rather than, say, a by-product of some other trait that is an adaptation, or a "spandrel" -- a feature that is the result of physical constraints on the structure or sub-structure of the organism. (Remember that in order for there to be natural selection, there has to be variation. If there's only one way that natural law permits a cognitive or affective structure to develop, then everyone would be the same.) There are also stochastic processes to consider: genetic drift, or founder effects (some desert-landscape lovers went and settled on an island, while all the desert-landscape haters suffered catastrophe on the mainland.) It's very difficult to figure out what kind of evidence or reasoning could...

Developing technologies have always caused new ethical challenges to arise, often by making once impossible states of affairs possible. Insofar as our ethical thinking has failed to take account of these new possibilities, our ethical systems will be tested. But I see no reason to think that foundational ethical facts, like the wrongness of causing gratuitous pain to a sentient creature, are under any threat from new inventions. You probably have in mind developments like in vitro fertilization and cloning. These developments challenge us to think harder about what it is about what qualities are really at the heart of moral personhood -- is it the mere biological fact of human specieshood, or is rather certain capacities, like being able to feel pain, or being able to reason? They also raise questions about what human beings ought to have the right to try to control, since they offer us the prospect of controlling things we couldn't at earlier times in our histories. Notice that...

Most philosophers now recognize a distinction between the biological category "sex" and the social category "gender." One's sex is determined by a collection of biological factors that typically (though not always!) go together: chromosomes, anatomy, and hormones. Gender is the social role a society assigns to persons on the basis of their sex: the set of expectations about behavior and appearance deemed appropriate for someone of that sex, and a system of rewards and sanctions that enforce conformity. The sanctions that I speak of can take many forms. There can be explicit laws or regulations specifying which roles can be performed by males and which by females, with punishments for violators. But there can also be informal or tacit conventions that are extremely effective. A man who wants to get ahead in the American business world will not wear skirts or lipstick, whereas a woman in the same milieu will do exactly that. (Check out "Dress for Success" at your local bookstore.) More...