Take the apparently straightforward, “Thou shalt not kill”. We’d need more than a few tablets of stone to catalogue the possible exceptions to this. Presumably, the present day Israelis and Palestinians are justifying the slaughter on the basis of one or more of the 612 other rules!

In any case, human behaviour has been less altered by the invention of laws, principles or ethics but is more a product of evolution and the survival of the fittest. So far, humans have only evolved to the point where we recognise that things could be better. Unfortunately, our selfish genes are not interested in ethics.

Substance abuse, sexual perversions and suicide are not necessarily antisocial behaviour, nor are all families good for society – think Mafia!

To dismiss all behavioural models and to claim we need a new codified ethics is very sweeping.

I thought the first monotheism was that of Akhenaton in Egypt.

The claim that “Monozygotic twin studies show that religiosity is genetically transmitted” is based on very limited studies by very few researchers. And what does “religiosity” mean in this context? Merely a temperamental tendency to meditativeness?

I presume the reference to “theosophy” is a misprint for “theology”. Theosophy (and much of theology) is unintelligible to adults!

I’m sure there are already many people working in the interface areas between psychology, sociology, anthropology and the other 11 domains, whatever they are.

I imagine one of the areas of “corroborated exemplary historical data” would be the history of the abolition of slavery, but this is hardly a subject that has been neglected.

The idea “of a computerised behavioural database” leading to “a pan global consensus and a system of ethics”, is surely only going to become possible when an Artificial Intelligence has been developed to whom we can assign the government of the world, as some transhumanists do indeed envisage.