(December 28, 2018 at 12:15 pm)Signa92 Wrote: Why is we as a species the only that can formulate thoughts to affect other people on this level of creating music instruments, philosophy and thinking for yourself. Animals have their limits and can only do so much, so why is only we who can expand this type of system to build and improve while animals live as they always have been.
Why would animals need to develop this kind of intelligence when intelligence doesn't help that much in the battle for survival? Take chimpanzees and gorillas who are the brainiest of the land animals, but they are not notably successful in the battle for survival. Sure, their present problem lies in their competition for living space with human beings, and they can't win there, but they weren't terribly successful even before people began to press directly upon them. Neither were elephants, which are also pretty brainy.
Consider the common rat. It lives right in human space, competes directly with us, withstands all the most ferocious human attempts to wipe it out, and flourishes. That's successful! Rats are pretty smart for their size, but they are not as smart as chimpanzees. What gives rats survival ability is not so much their intelligence as their size (they are small and hard to find), their dietary habits (they eat a wide variety of food and are hard to starve out), and, most of all, their fecundity (they have many young and can quickly replace any losses).
And if you think that rats are successful, consider roaches, which also live and compete with human beings, withstand all human attempts to destroy them, and flourish--yet have virtually no brains at all. But then, compared with rats, roaches are still smaller, have an even broader diet, and are yet more fecund.
But then again what counts about us is not so much our intelligence but technology. Dolphins may be highly intelligent, but so what? They have no technology.
Then, of course, we find that we have reached the point where technology has made it possible for us to multiply in an unrestrained fashion, to consume Earth's resources faster than they can be replaced, and to poison its soil, water, and air faster than they can be cleaned. We can even physically destroy our planet with nuclear warfare. Is this process inevitable?
So perhaps intelligence is useless for survival till it passes a certain point, and then when it starts to bring the world domination it is followed by a suicide.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
