Too Dumb to Live?

If you put certain simple organisms on a plate of nutrient material, they will multiply until they poison themselves with their own waste. Humans, too, have often demonstrated a rather similar behavior - Easter Island and Chaco Canyon for two examples.

Why so? In each case, the easy answer is to say that they were too dumb to know any better. It's not quite that simple, though. Other organisms demonstrate complex adaptive and cooperative behavior with a better long term prognosis. Our cousins the slime molds are a favourite of mine. People too have often proven capable of adapting.

A slightly more sophisticated answer is that the environment that humans (and the simple organisms of our first example) evolved for was an environment in which resources and predation limited the self-poisoning factor. The biologists agar plate, and our technological society, are just different versions of temporary release from that constraint.

Our technology has allowed us to multiply like those organisms on the agar plate, and also multiplied the rate at which we can poison our environment.

Many won't see it though. As Obi-Wan demonstrated, the weak-minded are easily influenced by the force - in this case the force of ideology, religion, and propaganda. Collectively speaking, our species just might be too dumb to live.

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