Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The most wonderful species?

The most wonderful species?

Why do we call humans the most wonderful of all species? After a million years or so of evolution, homo sapiens emerged in the last 100 000, to be called, in our time, the most wonderful and successful species of all. In the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, we have so overloaded the biosphere with the waste products of our greed, our addictions, and exploding population growth, that human as well as many other species very existence is threatened. (This is not a "belief", it is plain physics, as good as that which builds your cell phone).

What do we call a creature whose greed and addictions and lack of any sign of foresight, with no natural predators, which consumes its habitat and so extinguishes itself? Wonderful? Successful? Maybe '"failed experiment" would be more accurate?

Maybe, like bringing rabbits to Australia, goats to the Galapagos, beavers to Patagonia, where they had no natural predators and so proliferated wildly, the problem is simply that the big forebrain of homo sapiens makes it an alien species, anywhere on the planet. Are homo sapiens humans a "non-native" species, thus doomed to eat itself to death for lack of natural predators to prevent it consuming its habitat?
donato's Dictum

George B. Shaw

If more than 10% of the people like it, it's no good.

Those with a highly developed sense of observation are commonly called cynics by those who have none.