The other day, I was reading an article about termites and how their amazing skills and teamwork enable them to build incredible ‘residences’ in red landscape. Termites basically excavate sand from underground, mix it with their saliva and build mounds that house their colonies. Hundreds of these insects, fabricate each individual ‘brick’, make individual decisions on when and where to place each one, without any foreman’s orders or construction instruction. They are guided by climatic, environmental and social conditions.
The article goes on and brings up the point that soon we will be 10 billion people on Earth and we need lodging (and not everyone can afford mansions), so using termite inspired construction methods may be a thing of the future (the article did not mention it like this - I do).
As I was reading the article, I kept thinking about us humans, our intelligence and so-called mind and soul. How the combination of these features has allowed us to rule the Earth, and build incredible societies, tools, principles and operations. In fact, we think so much of ourselves, that when we want to degrade another human, we often accuse him/her of acting like an animal or a savage.
Ironically, however, we humans, perhaps because of the very intelligence and the mind that we have (and which is quite distinct from instinct), are the only creatures that intentionally and without any existential reasons (such as hunger or threat) kill others and our own species. So I wonder if we are not the savages.
I recall years ago, I met an astro-biologist (a biologist who researches what biology could be in other worlds, planets, solar systems) who said that intelligence is not necessarily prone to survival, in the Darwinian sense. I am worried that our generation and the next 2 or 3 generations will prove that he was right. Or maybe as my last post’s Einstein quote suggests, what we thought was intelligence, turns out to be stupidity.
Paris, March 2, 2023
Zeejay