In 1996, Bering was a student on an anthropology fellowship. He spent the summer studying a 450-pound silverback gorilla named King, who had been trained to entertain audiences by climbing atop a 20-gallon drum three times a day and belly dancing for a head of lettuce.

Bering found himself wondering what King would think of God - or if he thought of God at all.

"We tend to think that the answers to the biggest mysteries in life are somewhere 'out there' in the mysterious universe, when really it's the peculiar way our brains have evolved over the past several hundred thousand years that compels us to ask questions such as 'why am I here?' or 'what happens after I die?' in the first place," Bering said.

He recently conducted an experiment with children from 3 to 7 years old to see how they perceived unexpected events. He told each child that "Princess Alice," a friendly magic princess who could make herself invisible, would help them play a game in which they guessed which one of two boxes held a hidden ball. Bering designed the game so a picture would fall unexpectedly to the ground and a table lamp would flash on and off during the experiment.

Bering found that the oldest children were the most likely to believe that Alice was communicating with them, while the youngest simply shrugged their shoulders. Bering concluded that the three-year-olds were better scientists than the older children since they gave more plausible reasons for the unexpected events. The reason: the younger children had yet to develop the critical psychological ability to see such events as omens or symbols.

"It's a bit of a leap," Bering said, "but we can imagine how these capacities play out in the real world when people reason about the symbolic 'meaning' of, say, natural disasters." Bering cites the remarks of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who suggested that Hurricane Katrina was God's wake-up call to African Americans about rampant urban violence.

Bering asks "Just as canine teeth evolved to help people rip the flesh off bones, could a belief in God have evolved to help people tear off bits of meaning from an otherwise meaningless existence?" While the physical human body evolved by natural design - developing opposable thumbs and bipedal posture - has the human mind borne the thumbprint of evolution as well?

If one day everyone developed autism or otherwise lost the ability to think about other minds, church attendance would hit an all-time low, Bering argues. The reason: a key ingredient for a belief in God, Bering believes, is "an innate disposition to see others as thinking, feeling beings, just like the self."

As a graduate student, he developed an unusual taste for existential writers such as Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Friedrich Nietzshe. It occurred to him that the focus of these authors' works - meaninglessness, death, and the existence of God - had been ignored by mainstream cognitive science.

"I'd spent the last four years working with chimpanzees, and though most researchers in the field were telling us that there was only a matter of degree between chimpanzee and human minds, it was hard for me to believe that apes pondered their existence at any level," he said. "I wanted to know why human minds were strangely saddled with these heavy ideas of meaning and death and God; I was convinced it was something fundamentally unique to the way our minds had evolved since we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees several million years ago."

More than other sciences, Bering believes cognitive science has the potential to teach us how we all truly fit as individual souls in this world.

"We may not like the answers that Darwinian natural selection provides," Bering said, "but that doesn't make them any less true."

The evolutionary growth in hominid brain size remains a mystery and a major point of contention among anthropologists. Our brains weigh roughly twice as much as our similarly sized earliest human relative, Homo habilis two million years ago. The big question is which came first – the bigger brain or the social, linguistic and tool-making skills we associate with it?

But, Dr. Cunnane argues that most anthropologists are ignorant or dismissive of the key missing link to help answer this question: the metabolic constraints that are critical for healthy human brain development today, and for its evolution.

Human brains aren't just comparatively big, they're hungry. The average newborn's brain consumes an amazing 75-per cent of an infant's daily energy needs. According to Dr. Cunnane, to fuel this neural demand, human babies are born with a built-in energy reservoir – that cute baby fat. Human infants are the only primate babies born with excess fat. It accounts for about 14 per cent of their birth weight, similar to that of their brains.

It's this baby fat, says Dr. Cunnane, that provided the physiological winning conditions for hominids' evolutionary brain expansion. And how were hominid babies able to pack on the extra pounds? According to Cunnane their moms were dining on shoreline delicacies like clams and catfish.

"The shores gave us food security and higher nutrient density. My hypothesis is that to permit the brain to start to increase in size, the fittest early humans were those with the fattest infants," says Dr. Cunnane, author of the book Survival of the Fattest, published in 2005.

Unlike the prehistoric savannahs or forests, argues Dr. Cunnane, ancient shoreline environments provided a year-round, accessible and rich food supply. Such an environment was found in the wetlands and river and lake shorelines that dominated east Africa's prehistoric Rift Valley in which early humans evolved.

Dr. Cunnane points to the table scrap fossil evidence collected by his symposium co-organizer Dr. Kathy Stewart from the Canadian Museum of Nature, in Ottawa. Her study of fossil material excavated from numerous Homo habilis sites in eastern Africa revealed a bevy of chewed fish bones, particularly catfish.

More than just filling the larder, shorelines provided essential brain boosting nutrients and minerals that launched Homo sapiens brains past their primate peers, says Dr. Cunnane, the Canada Research Chair in Brain Metabolism and Aging.

Brain development and function requires ample supplies of a particular polyunsaturated fatty acid: docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). DHA is critical to proper neuron function. Human baby fat provides both an energy source for the rapidly growing infant grey matter, and also, says Dr. Cunnane, a greater concentration of DHA per pound than at any other time in life.

Aquatic foods are also rich in iodine, a key brain nutrient. Iodine is present in much lower amounts from terrestrial food sources such as mammals and plants.

It was this combination of abundant shoreline food and the "brain selective nutrients" that sparked the growth of the human brain, he says.

"Initially there wasn't selection for a larger brain," argues Dr. Cunnane. "The genetic possibility was there, but it remained silent until it was catalyzed by this shore-based diet."

Dr. Cunnane acknowledges that for the past 20 years he's been swimming upstream when it comes to convincing anthropologists of his position, especially that initial hominid brain expansion happened by chance rather than adaptation.

But, he says, the evidence of the importance of key shoreline nutrients to brain development is still with us – painfully so. Iodine deficiency is the world's leading nutrient deficiency. It affects more than a 1.5 billion people, mostly in inland areas, and causes sub-optimal brain function. Iodine is legally required to be added to salt in more than 100 countries.

Says Dr. Cunnane: "We've created an artificial shore-based food supply in our salt."

NHK television said the evaluation was made in a report from a court-appointed psychiatrist who examined Shoko Asahara, the founder of the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

Asahara was sentenced to death by hanging in 2004 after being found guilty of being responsible for the sarin gas attack, which killed 12 people and made thousands of others sick in 1995.

Asahara's lawyers had argued that the 50-year-old was mentally ill. They asked for the case to be suspended.

NHK television said the psychiatrist's evaluation could open the door for Asahara's appeal to be heard by Tokyo High Court, which is expected to uphold the death sentence.

On March 20, 1995, five cult members pierced bags of sarin – a nerve gas developed by the Nazis – on separate trains as they converged in central Tokyo's national government district.

They killed 12 people and made thousands of others sick.

The cult claimed it was a pre-emptive strike against police planning raids on the group.

The judge in the original trial concluded that Asahara plotted to spread sarin gas across Tokyo in order to "destroy the capital and build his own kingdom."

Asahara was convicted of killing 27 people in total, including former members of the cult and an anti-cult lawyer and his family.

A number of other former cult members have received death sentences for participating in the attack on the subway system.

Alison Heruth appeared in court Saturday after being arrested at her home in Minnesota. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said Heruth is accused of pretending to be the lead actress in the show, DHS.

Authorities say more than $5.5 million US ($6.3 million) was raised from investors who had been told the show had the endorsement of the White House. They allege the money was channeled to Heruth’s associate, Joseph Medawar.

Officials say the money was used to pay for personal expenses such as jewelry, home rentals, entertainment and car leases.

Heruth has been charged with two counts of concealing the crime and one charge of making false statements to the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. She is out on bail and due back in court in March. Heruth faces up to 12 years in jail in convicted on all charges.

The 41-year-old woman is listed in the IMDB website as having appeared in a 2001 movie Posljednja volja, also known as The Last Will, under the name Alison Heruth-Waterbury.

Medawar is free on a $1 million bond. He had been arrested last September and charged with 34 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and other charges.

It’s alleged Medwar got at least 70 investors to buy stock in his production company and had claimed that 26 episodes of DHS were in post-production.