Well, that's certainly disappointing. 

(& tropical traditions & organic pastures = grain fed cows);[/url]

Where do you get the info that Organic Pastures grain feeds their cows?  On their packaging and on their website they claim that the graze in the fields.  They even have mobile milking barns that they take to the part of the pasture where their cows are fed, rather than having to keep the cows in one place.

Nice vid.  I've never watched anything from him before.  What he's encapsulated here is pretty much how I try and view the world.  I found it a good and enjoyable reminder.

Wrangham was one of the authors of the study, but another collaborator was Stephen Secor whose main focus of research has been the digestive system of pythons http://lib.bioinfo.pl/auth:Secor,SM.  Because of this I see no reason to doubt the accuracy of the descriptions of times and energy levels of python digestion.  The extrapolation to humans at the beginning of the abstract is a lot dodgier, but all of us who've made it this far into the world of interpreting and digesting (pun intended) research should be familiar with how fast and loose many authors are with inserting opinions and conclusions into abstracts that have absolutely nothing to do with the data presented in the paper (e.g. many studies that purport to vilify cholesterol and Saturated fat).  I see no reason why snakes can't digest cooked meat more easily than raw while it being the reverse for humans.

I have not read the full studies that you linked to, just the abstracts, but the first one seems to indicate that many plant foods are more easily digestible when cooked (hmm, should we be eating raw meat and cooked plants?) and the only reference to protein digestibility refers to "excessive heat."  Without referring to the body of the study I can't know exactly what temperature "excessive heat" refers to or if the damage caused increases linearly or exponentially as temperatures are raised.  I don't want to make any assumptions, but based just on this info it is equally as likely that low temperature cooking is beneficial or neutral as it is harmful.

From the second study, I'm really not sure what Volatile Ammonium Bases are or what affect they have on digestion, if any.  From a Google search it also appears that these substances have only been measured in fish, not land animals, so the study doesn't necessarily have any bearing whatsoever on the cooking of terrestrial meat.  Without knowing what effect VAB's actually have on the human body or digestion of fish I can't say that this study gives us any information on the human digestion of cooked seafood either.  Also, the study found similar changes in the fish not only from cooking but from freezing and storing.  The freezing and storing is exactly what the Inuit would do, so saying that a change caused by cooking is bad when the same change caused by freezing and storing is neutral or good seems untenable to me.

If you're talking store bought meat (as opposed to a fresh kill) then over 99% of the blood is drained out before it gets to you.  My understanding is that what's left is intersitial fluid and cytosol colored mainly by myoglobin.

Why does he cook his meat - raw meat and fat could make a health jump 

When queried about this in the past he replied that none of the primitive societies that he was aware of ate a diet high in raw animal foods.  He prefers to cook his meats to medium.

edit:  upon reading some of Charle's new forum he now says that he eats his beef medium-rare and is getting rarer.

Bears do not at the flesh, only the skin. This is where the fat is.

This may be sometimes true, but I have seen video of grizzly bears consuming the entire fish.

I think that we will likely all agree that nutrition, particularly in the formative years of childhood and in the womb, have a profound effect on the function of the brain and other related systems of the body.  I find it very plausible that diet affects mood and judgment.  Proving this, and particularly proving a causal link between crime and diet, is likely to be impossible.

Looking for correlations between criminals and diet will be just as hard and fraught with error as any other epidemiological study.  (Starting with the fact that self reporting of diet is very unreliable, all of the experts on this board excluded from that generalization, of course  )  Your criteria for ruling out other factors is very vague and the example does not prove your point.  We can just as easily assume that the armed robber killed the clerk for fun and that the money is just a prize.  In giving the criminal a motive we've created and accepted a non-testable hypothesis.

Most people do the right thing most of the time, but there does exist a small percentage of the population0 that has no real empathy for others and their suffering.  We call them sociopaths.  It would take a lot of work to convince me that diet has a crucial role in the brain disorders that cause sociopathy.  There is some evidence that connects sociopathy with oxytocin disorders.  The June 08 Scientific American has a great article that looks into some of that research.

Brains are illegal in the US.

Do you have any source for this?  I'm not certain, but I don't think that this is the case.  If it is true then someone should be able to point us to the appropriate laws.

While I have never had the pleasure of eating them myself, I know that the San Francisco restaurant Incanto has served calves brains at least once and as recently as last year.