"This intelligence thing might not work out, you know." The book group I was saying this to must have assumed I meant the silly attempt of the current government to blame the WMD issue on "bad intelligence." But by intelligence I meant the self-aware brain functions we pretentiously call intelligence. After all, I observed, intelligence hasn't existed on this planet for all that long. Everyone just assumes that we humans are the "intelligent" species (an arguable assumption, I know, but you know what I mean), but there are plenty of species that have been getting along perfectly well without this dubious gift of intelligence. And they've been at it for a much longer time than us. They could do so even if we use our cleverness to make nuclear devices and wipe ourselves out. Species so simple they could survive a nuclear winter. Like cockroaches, for instance.
One of the points I made was that, if you looked at the age of the universe as one year (with the big bang on January 1 and the present as midnight on New Year's Eve, as Carl Sagan did, see the link above), then the dinosaurs get a week and human history gets about 5 minutes. Arguably, those pea-sized dinosaur brains may have done better by their host species than all our grey matter is doing for us.
These observations were greeted with admirable tolerance, and normal conversation soon resumed.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
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