Are Fish Really Smarter Than Humans?
Ξ July 9th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Op-Ed, Uncategorized |
Evolution, for some reason, is a touchy subject. Why it’s touchy I’ll never understand because I can’t imagine a better reason for standing in absolute awe of your preferred deity than if he/she/it had a hand in this most beautifully flowing process that gave rise to everything around us…or perhaps your god is that process. But, let’s leave religion aside (as much as possible) to consider just evolution itself for one second.
We’ve all got a general concept of what the process entails: the strong organisms survive to pass on their genes, those genes continue to be expressed and so every species, through its interactions with the greater ecosystem, is in a constant state of refinement towards the end of being better suited to survive and procreate. Where evolution gets really interesting is at the very tip where we find ourselves today.
This is a time when humanity is more interconnected and organized across the entire planet than ever before. Years from now we will look back with fascination at the way our species is coagulating on the internet, slipping and sliding across time zones, forming into groups and splitting like cells and generally merging into one great big organism unto itself. People move about the globe at incredible speed just like blood cells coarse through our veins and ideas are transferred just like signals from our brains fly along our nerves. We are more dependent on each other than ever before and more affected by the successes and failures of cultures halfway around the world as well. Somehow, we haven’t assimilated that concept yet.
Taking a brief glance over our shoulders, we can see that, in the time that has passed since the Enlightenment, humanity has increasingly seen itself as separate from and superior to nature. The health of our very home and the wellbeing of our own brethren have taken a backseat to the project of human progress. There’s truly no other explanation for the present state of pollution and mass extinction we have inflicted upon the planet than this grand illusion that somehow we’ve got no one to answer to but ourselves. We’re already begun paying the price for our self-imposed isolation from nature and the price is only moving upwards. I think that realizing our role in the grand scheme of evolution can help to solve the problems that we’ve caused believing we’re above nature.
The first step towards a peaceful symbiosis with the earth is recognizing that we are only one piece of the equation. We must recognize that as a species we’re not the general manager of the planet; we’re just another player on the team. Thankfully, it seems like this is beginning to happen. Books like The World Without Us are showing in very real terms that team earth will continue to play without us, and play quite well. In many cases the planet is better off. It’s a startling realization. It will take time, but it seems like we’re beginning to come to terms with this idea.
Being at the leading edge of evolution as we are, though, we’ve got the intelligence to be the star player. We’re just not living up to our potential and we need to find out how we can. So, the second step we can take as a species is to make sense of all this interconnectedness and organize our priorities. We are splitting ourselves into pieces running in ten different directions at once. We need people like Bjorn Lomborg, renowned Danish economist, at the helm to put things in perspective (for more info check out this video of him at TED). He’s come up with a startling ranking of the most cost-efficient global problems to put our money and effort towards and it will probably shock you how incredibly inefficient we are as a group. Horrendous humanitarian crises like malaria and malnutrition could be checked off the list in years and yet they seem to be placed lower on the list than global warming, which will take exponentially more money to fix and the results will take decades or more perhaps.
If humanity is becoming a meta-organism than it’s a paraplegic right now. Imagine how much more efficient we would be, how much more effectively we could address grand issues like global warming if we had access to the billions of potential Edisons, Einsteins and Salks on the earth right now who are hidden behind curtains of poverty and disease. Just imagine how much more talent this meta-organism is working with because of the civil and women’s rights movements…it’s staggering. Now, consider that there are a billion people on earth living on less than a dollar a day. We’re nowhere close to accessing the full capabilities of the human race.
I’ve always been amazed by massive schools of fish and flocks of birds that zigzag through water and air, cutting back and forth in complete unison at lightning speed. I’ve always wondered how it’s possible that such seemingly “dumb” animals are able to act as a single unit with such grace and speed. At some point, however, they didn’t do this I realized. They learned it. They evolved to do this. Although it seems obvious, it’s one of those incredible epiphanies to realize that these creatures learned over time to move together like this as a pack. It’s astonishing what even the tiniest form of life can accomplish when it has to. I can’t even begin to imagine humans trying to do the same thing as these birds and fish, whose brains are a fraction the size of ours. But, we can learn to fly and swim like them in our own way. We can act together as a unit just like them and become much more intelligent, quick and graceful than we are now. It’s becoming an evolutionary imperative that we do.
