(September 9, 2010 at 12:12 pm)Skipper Wrote: This is how I see things as well. We are really useless animals.
I really can't accept that as any kind of truth.
Humans have certrainly done something right, as we're the top animal on the planet right now with the potential to spread to ecological systems never meant for any creature (the antarctic, the moon, mars, venus, etc). Further, we got the way we are precisely because nature evolved us into what we are and even our closest relatives couldn't readily compete with us.
This is because we've evolved in the manner that we have and has given us a very important (and biologically expensive) tool for our survival - our brains.
Some of you are right though, if you pluck us into the ocean, the desert, or a frozen savannah, we're not going to survive very well - much in the same way that if you pluck a polar bear into the middle of death valley, you're going to have a very dead bear before too long. Humans are social and group-oriented creatures who are biologically adapted to plains and warm forests (like many places in the mid-southern africa - particularly in and around the congo forests), but humans have adapted technologically (thanks to our natural evolutionary advances) to places where not only where humans were never evolved to survive but even in some places where only the most extreme of adapted creatures (extremeophile bacteria) can survive or even nothing (like the moon).
So, I can't in good concience say that humans are an evolutionarily useless animal.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan