some define intelligence as the ability to comprehend; or to compute. to "grok".
others like to define it as the ability to think adaptively, i.e. to learn from experience. those are probably the two most common uses of the word. people don't usually think of intelligence in terms of morality. which is why discussions such as this can get thorny. it's hard to keep questions of morality out of a discussion about raw survival; not just our own but, conceivably that of all life as we know it. it's very popular (and convenient, for the agenda-setters) to trumpet human intelligence and ingenuity, and leave wisdom (i began writing this last night, so i've been preempted by your contribution, robert) out of the discussion entirely. it's truly remarkable, though IMO no accident, how truly rarely you hear the word "wisdom" used nowadays, in almost any context. in any case, the question of wisdom puts chomsky's proposition in an entirely different light. is it about sheer brain size? or the kind of brain? the homo sapiens brain is not the largest. it seems whales and porpoises (or many of them, at least), have bigger brains than us. and i've read somewhere that neanderthals, also, may have had more brain than we do. the nature/natural history programs on television like to point out that their brains "must have" been (read "we need to believe that they were") less evolved. because the art and tools they left behind indicate this. perhaps. but, even supposing this, does this mean they were less happy? less fulfilled? we know that they coexisted with humans for a time. when it was proposed, based on some remains that were found, that homo sapiens and neanderthals interbred, there were a few who accepted the proposition as worthy of further investigation. but many more who categorically rejected it. the "nays" have since been proven wrong by genetic analysis. but the immediacy and vehemence of their rejection of the idea was noteworthy. clearly motivated by a pro-human bias. they couldn't imagine themselves intermingling with an "inferior race", so why would early humans have done so? yet a few, at least, obviously did. maybe that's why we killed them off, you know? the oldest story in the book. "them so-and-so's is stealin' our women! we ain't gonna stand fer that!!" seriously, though. interbreeding happened. but not often: how do we know it wasn't they who scorned us? then there's the whales. we know their ancestors were land dwellers. in other words, sea creatures gave rise to land creatures, and some of them chose to return to the sea. why would they do that? this is a serious question. after all, you're giving up an awful lot. think about it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20110514/3c238927/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
