Why intelligence?
Posted On Wednesday, December 29, 2004 at at 7:30 PM by BijeshIntelligence. Humungous leaps in everything. Equally big leaps towards the end.
This is something I have always wondered about. Why did humans have to have this all-conquering knowledge? Every other living thing on this planet have an intelligence that seems much lower than an average human's. (Let's not talk about those ultra-smart monkeys we see on NatGeo). Every form of life lives and dies, worrying only about surviving. Finding food to survive, finding protection to survive.
What quirk of evolution created this monstrous intelligence in us? The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this was a ploy in evolution's game. Evolution does not always get things right the first time. There is always some anomaly that would need to be corrected. The mistake does not manifest immediately. The bug takes ages to surface. That is why evolution needs a restart once in a while; to set right the wrong.
Until now, these restarts appear to have been triggered only by natural causes - the Ice Age, the asteroid collision that ended the dinosaur age and many others that have gone unnoticed. So this time nature thinks up of an interesting way. Man gets super-intelligence. Human intelligence is evolution's way of ensuring that the cycle of life restarts from scratch yet again.
Its disguised as something that would help man better his life. It does provide him all the comfort that he can dream of. But on the sidelines, unnoticed, the darker side creeps along. Some people do notice the darkness, but the majority don't and the majority always wins. Everything that the intelligence was used to create added comfort to man's already pampered life. But on every one of them, piggy-backed, arrives a new step towards the end. There come the pollution, the weapons, the man-induced natural disasters. Marching steadily, camouflaged beyond recognition. When they do get spotted, it is already too late.
Someday, the cursed intelligence would have ushered in enough to push the restart button. And the world will be reset once again and the clock rewound yet again for a new cycle to begin. There may not be any human-like life in the new cycle. But again, there could be one.
What if humans had not evolved from the cave-man? What if our intelligence was limited like in other animals? Limited to surviving skills. Limited to knowing what can be eaten and what shouldn't be, learning to run when attacked. The world would have been a better place, wouldn't it? Well, wouldn't evolution then have found some other method to perform the routine maintenance shutdown? It would have! In any case, that would have been better than the slow poison that human intelligence is.
This is something I have always wondered about. Why did humans have to have this all-conquering knowledge? Every other living thing on this planet have an intelligence that seems much lower than an average human's. (Let's not talk about those ultra-smart monkeys we see on NatGeo). Every form of life lives and dies, worrying only about surviving. Finding food to survive, finding protection to survive.
What quirk of evolution created this monstrous intelligence in us? The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this was a ploy in evolution's game. Evolution does not always get things right the first time. There is always some anomaly that would need to be corrected. The mistake does not manifest immediately. The bug takes ages to surface. That is why evolution needs a restart once in a while; to set right the wrong.
Until now, these restarts appear to have been triggered only by natural causes - the Ice Age, the asteroid collision that ended the dinosaur age and many others that have gone unnoticed. So this time nature thinks up of an interesting way. Man gets super-intelligence. Human intelligence is evolution's way of ensuring that the cycle of life restarts from scratch yet again.
Its disguised as something that would help man better his life. It does provide him all the comfort that he can dream of. But on the sidelines, unnoticed, the darker side creeps along. Some people do notice the darkness, but the majority don't and the majority always wins. Everything that the intelligence was used to create added comfort to man's already pampered life. But on every one of them, piggy-backed, arrives a new step towards the end. There come the pollution, the weapons, the man-induced natural disasters. Marching steadily, camouflaged beyond recognition. When they do get spotted, it is already too late.
Someday, the cursed intelligence would have ushered in enough to push the restart button. And the world will be reset once again and the clock rewound yet again for a new cycle to begin. There may not be any human-like life in the new cycle. But again, there could be one.
What if humans had not evolved from the cave-man? What if our intelligence was limited like in other animals? Limited to surviving skills. Limited to knowing what can be eaten and what shouldn't be, learning to run when attacked. The world would have been a better place, wouldn't it? Well, wouldn't evolution then have found some other method to perform the routine maintenance shutdown? It would have! In any case, that would have been better than the slow poison that human intelligence is.
