Recent years have been unkind to the dinosaurs, and unkind to this movie. I think the Cretaceous extinction event is still shooting a few final hoops against them as the clock runs down in 2015. We now know that dinosaurs had feathers. And we know that an apatosaurus, a tricerotops, and a pterodactyl in the same scene makes as much sense as a historical movie in which Cleopatra consults George Washington on the construction of the Great Wall of China. But this movie is still powerful.

And big. That’s mostly what I remembered – creatures inhabiting a landscape that makes everything seem small. That’s what separates it from Disney’s the Lion King – in this movie, nobody’s the king, and even mighty apex predators often end up behind the eightball. The dinosaurs aren’t masters of their domain, they’re struggling to survive in a changing world. The questing youngsters find a kind of sanctuary at the end, but after their travails it seems a bit mocking – like giving a child a lollipop after open heart surgery. That’s the other thing I remember, the gloom.

Otherwise The Land Before Time can be compared to The Lion King quite a bit – some parts line up shot for shot. Tiny creatures scurrying around gigantic paws. A warped, twisted landscape with a palette to match, full of ochre reds and cinerous grays. The death of a parent as a plot device, and divine intervention from that parent’s spirit to close an open plot parenthesis.

The Land Before Time bears the scars of the moviemaking process – certain scenes seem curiously truncated and brief, as if vital footage was slashed out of the movie with an axe. The whole enterprise seems strangely short – barely longer than an hour. Movies about dinosaurs usually slow down and bask in the experience. This one just has young and vulnerable dinosaurs running from danger to danger, which might stress younger viewers.

It’s probably the second best Don Bluth film, behind Secret of NIMH (whose laurels partly belong to another, as it was adapted from a book). Bluth’s animation studio never succeeded taking much market share from Disney, but they probably opened up animation to a few new people. Disney’s movies from this period are hard to watch as an adult – Bluth’s are not. There’s a nice depth to them: not depth in that they’re saying something profound (every Don Bluth movie can be essentially reduced to a “follow your heart” or “believe in yourself” message), but in that there’s a lot of cinematic space explored: subtle interplays of textures and sounds, and occasional unconventional artistic choices.

On the downside, all the dinosaurs have cutesy names for themselves (long-necks, sharp-teeth, etc), sparing us the indignity of antediluvian creatures uttering Latin phylogenetic classifications at the expense of causing my sister to think that those were the actual names for the dinosaurs.

Why is suicide illegal? Because it’s a crime to destroy government property (har har)?. I’ve heard that the truth is that it gives first respondents a pretext to enact drastic measures to save your life. Under normal circumstances, people have the right to refuse medical care.

From the perspective of third parties, suicide is clearly a bad thing – a get out of jail free card when other people want you to keep playing. But how do you block the dam at the source? How do you stop people from doing it?

You’ve got to persuade them that death is no escape. Here are some methods that have been tried:

1. In the West Indies under Spanish occupation (as recorded by Girolamo Benzoni), vast numbers of men committed suicide by jumping from cliffs or by killing each other. He adds that, out of the two million original inhabitants of Haiti, fewer than 150 survived as a result of the suicides and slaughter (a number that’s hard to believe). In the end the Spaniards, seeing their labor pool dwindle, put a stop to the epidemic of suicides by persuading the Indians that they, too, would kill themselves, and would follow them into the afterlife to inflict fresh tortures. “Kill yourselves, and we’ll be there holding open the gate.”

2. In the Spanish American War, the Moros would strip naked, bind their penises and testicles with green strips of cow hide, and soak the cow hide in salt water, causing it to shrink around their genitals, causing tremendous pain. They were in such agony that they’d attack the enemy in a blind fury and feel nothing, not even a shot to the heart (apparently this is the reason the Americans switched from .38s to .45s, which is not the only time small penises and big guns have gone together, but I go off-piste). The eventual solution to these suicide attacks was to capture the Moros alive, wrap them in a pig skin, bury them up to the neck, and leave them to die. From their perspective, pork meant eternal damnation. When the Americans starting doing this, the situation rapidly returned to normal.

Is there a secular method to deter suicide? Maybe. You’d have to start out with kids, and school them the right way.

“Killing yourself? No. Doesn’t work. The universe always knows. Here’s what happens: you black out from the pills, the bloodied knife falls from your hands, you feel the galvanic surge of the train passing over and through you…and then you wake up, alive and unhurt. The kettle’s boiling. It’s time to go to school, or go to work, or go to nowhere at all. You haven’t escaped. The bottomless abyss just drops you back in other the top. I’ve tried doing it over and over. So have we all. There’s no getting out of here, and we just have to live through it.”

Wouldn’t they have heard of successful suicide victims on the news? People who apparently did what a guy on PUAHate once described to me as “manually stop breathing”?

Maybe you can explain to your kids about how time has a subjective element. For some, it’s a tumbling waterfall. For others, it’s a trickling brook. Maybe for suicide victims, it has the consistency of pitch at room temperature – apparently solid, yet flowing over the course of millions of years. As you kill yourself, your brain captures a moment, and holds it in Zeno’s paradox of increasingly smaller intervals, stretching out eternally.

People who get run over by a train? They’re still under the train.

There’s ways to make suicide seem far less attractive. It involves lying, but maybe suicide victims themselves are already deceiving themselves by imagining an escape route anywhere.

From theoretical genetics comes the idea of a “green beard” gene, which a) gives you some clear physical sign of its presence (canonically, a green beard), and b) modifies your behavior so that you’re nice to people with that physical trait. And by “nice”, we’re talking about altruism: you do things to benefit them even when there’s no benefit to yourself.

The trouble is that such a gene would have an Achilles heel: genetic freeloaders. Suppose a mutation appeared that gave you a green beard but DIDN’T affect your behavior. You’d gain the benefits of the green beard gene (green bearders would be nice to you), but wouldn’t have to pay any costs. Such a mutation would theoretically outcompete the legitimate green beard gene until the value of green beards was destroyed.

Or would it? Did cubic zirconia destroy the value of diamonds? The presence of fakers doesn’t seem to render authentic items worthless – or if it does, it does so in an arbitrary and unclear way. Certain moths have evolved the yellow and black banding of wasps (freeloading off the wasps’ “I am poisonous” heraldry)…but flying insects with yellow and black banding are still scary. It seems that there’s a delicate equilibrium between reals and fakes that can exist without tipping one way or another. After all, it benefits the fake green beard gene for there still to be some social cachet to a green beard.

None of these genes are known to exist. But there are cultural, information-based green beards.

Gang tattoos, for one. Items of religious faith (such as a cross, or a hijab), for another. These are props that signal to other gang members or believers “I am part of the in-group. Favour me.” According to the fake green beard principle, you’d expect to see lots of “fake green memes” – people who wear a cross and reap the benefits, but don’t bother going to church or paying any other price for their faith. And sure, you could put guys like Tim Lambesis in that category.

But at the same time, fake Christians aren’t wildly outcompeting true Christians. Generally people who wear crosses do go to church, and do believe. Obviously, there are limits to how far this sort of memetic fakery can reach.

Maybe this is why so many religions insist on public, costly shows of faith – to help keep the flock pure of non-altruistic green beard fakes. And maybe this explains why so many religious rites seem bizarre and strange to outsiders – they’re that way by design. Why would you insist someone do something sensible to show his faith? It’d be like a college fraternity where joining requires that you change your car’s oil, brush your teeth, and call your mom every week.

This could explain things like the Grishneshwar Temple Baby Toss, where newborns are flung from a tower to a canopy 50 feet below. No way would a fake green beard do that. Rituals like this are sieves, meant to separate the sheep from the goats, and the costlier and more dangerous, the better. Remember, fake believers water down the purity of the religion. You cannot allow freeloaders to benefit from the in-group’s altruism. And it’s ironic that this green beard memetic behavior is actually damaging its subjects at the genetic level.

This is probably Dickie Dawkins’ big contribution to the philosophy of biology: recognising that humans aren’t just a canvas for recombinant DNA, but also a canvas for information-based replicators of all kinds. DNA isn’t the only way to play this game, we have other things trying to spread themselves via our bodies – and sometimes they can even override the power of genes.

Catholic priests are celibate – a drastic act of faith that takes your reproductive fitness down to a number closely resembling “zero”. Why? To prove the seriousness of their beliefs. That seems odd to outsiders: killing off your genetic strain for the sake of making a point. But I wonder what sorts of green beard memes are currently infesting your mind.