The article's author, Benjamin Phelan, fears that evolution is leading humans to a "self inflicted extinction". What this means is that the capacity for thought created by natural selection and evolution is what is allowing humans to make inventions and weapons that could potentially lead to our destruction. He cites the creation of nuclear weapons and refrigerators that used to be cooled by ammonia as inventions that could have lead to our extinction. He feels that the more the human brain evolves, the greater the risk for us wiping ourselves out.
I agree that there is some merrit in worrying about our increased intelligence. As humanity has progressed through history we've continued to find new and unique ways of killing each other. And besides weapons technology increasing over the last century, the more we look into science the more oppertunities we have for inadvertantly causing us to go extinct.
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I got the same message. Since I'm on a matrix kick lately, I remember a seen that reminded me of the article. Agent Smith is taking to Morpheus about how humans have become a "virus" since we have evolved to the point where our environment must adapt to us and when all the resources are gone we move on to a different host.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Na9-jV_OJI
Matt C loving the post that's such a good example of what is going on in the article.
ReplyDelete"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein
I thought of that quote after reading your post.
It's interesting and kind of scary...why are we focusing so much on developing technologies that will help "protect" us from terrorists when we should really be focusing on un-doing the damage that this "protection" did to the environment? I wouldn't consider myself one of those enthusiastic "go green!" people but there are some things that just don't make sense, and to me this is one of them. No matter how into this whole green movement you are, it's still pretty obvious that we are slowly destroying our world, and that's going to harm future people whether we like it or not, so we should at least begin to make small changes toward improvement.
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