“It
is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the
strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able
to adapt to and to adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds
itself……so says Charles Darwin in his “Origin of Species"
Leon C. Megginson
This
morning, after over-sleeping and not yet having a good cup of coffee…
I found myself beset with examples of my
specie’s apparent inability to deal with large, complex problems and threats,
while remaining mired in minutia and monkey games. The examples placed before
ranged in scale from immediately around me to the unfortunate content of
today’s news.
I
stopped for a moment and thought:
I
wonder if advanced intelligence can be an overspecialization?
We
pride ourselves on our intelligence, and much of the story, the saga of our
rise to world dominance is (if not depicted as the result of our being favored
by some invisible all powerful ethereal creature(s) )founded on our mental
abilities producing a behavioral repertoire unmatched by any other creature on
the planet. But the most rapid change we currently need to adapt to, is the
product of our advanced intelligence accreted into the usual animal instincts
and legacy behaviors.
The
apparent inability of a majority of us not being capable of, or not caring
about, it being hard to discern which; understanding our impact now and since
the last ice age on our biogeophysical surroundings is perhaps, the best
example of this.
Most
of us seem ill disposed or unable, to act with the knowledge we now have of
our impact through time. That temporal element for us; the accelerating,
accumulating, multi-linear, interacting blizzard of changes that our
intelligence spawns, eludes us. When we do get a glimpse, our obligate and
socially obligate boundary conditions tie us in knots, launches waves of
combinatorial explosions that drive us back into the trees of the tried and
true.
Will
our species and our daughter specie in the future be an even brainier version
of ourselves? Or, will the future be
left to our daughter specie who is a bit slower in the head, sturdier and
simpler?
· * “A
petard was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching
fortifications, of French origin and dating back to the sixteenth century. A
typical petard was a conical or rectangular metal object containing 2–3 kg (5
or 6 pounds) of gunpowder, with a slow match as a fuse…. The pétard, a rather
primitive and exceedingly dangerous explosive device, consisted of a brass or
iron bell-shaped device filled with gunpowder fixed to a wooden base called a
madrier. This was attached to a wall or gate using hooks and rings, the fuse
lit and, if successful, the resulting explosive force, concentrated at the
target point, would blow a hole in the obstruction, allowing assault troops to
enter. The word remains in modern usage
in the phrase hoist with one's own petard, which means "to be harmed by
one's own plan to harm someone else" or "to fall into one's own
trap," implying that one could be lifted up (hoist, or blown upward) by one's
own bomb.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard
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