Of Science and Stupidity

Sometimes being an intelligent human being is so tiring.

Look at this story: Hello Smartypants: Baby Chimps are as Bright as Human Infants

The breathless reportage of this utterly misunderstood story is enervating. One can only stand so much raw stupidity. And it's piling up too fast to deal with. I'm going into "Stupidity Overload".

Normally I'd just roll my eyes and move on. This sort of story isn't wrong. It just tries to imply what ain't so. But it grabbed my attention particularly because last night I caught part of a television documentary about chimps & intelligence and one of the "experts" said something monumentally stupid.

This grey-haired, supercilious moron suggested that assuming humans were smarter than chimps was "human-centric" and that our ability to do calculus, or play the piano—which he identified as behaviors humans consider expressing intelligence—would not be useful for survival in the chimps' jungle environment - ergo human "intelligence" was "situational" and thus not "objectively" greater than that of chimps.

Now just hold that idea under your tongue for a moment. And consider. This Ph.D. said this with perfect sincerity, with perfect seriousness. This shallow, stupid man actually thinks that because a man might die in an environment where a chimp might survive, it puts the superiority of man's intelligence in question.

How do you even hold a conversation with somebody like that? How is it this man is doing scientific research that may actually define "science" or our culture?

He actually references calculus and piano playing. And because they won't increase one's skills to survive in the jungle, he implies they do not represent real intelligence.

Where, I wonder, does he think calculus and pianos come from? And why there aren't any in the chimps' jungle? While he clearly believes in evolution, he seems to be unaware that evolution requires that at one time humans, too, were residents of the jungle.

But now have calculus and pianos.

If I winnow it down to its simplest premise, this "intellectual" is saying that if a beast survives a given environment better than a man, it demonstrates that man is not more intelligent than the beast, just "differently" intelligent.

Begins to sound familiar.

And if we take that to its logical conclusion, doesn't that mean than men are no smarter than, say oysters? We can't survive in their environment either.

Well, except for all the equipment we've invented that allows us to pretty much survive in every environment, including underwater, such as scuba gear, and wet-suits, and submarines, and diving bells, and diving suits...

...and jungles, if you include the "intelligence" to make jeeps, guns, tents, machetes, sun-screen, snake-venom antidotes, boots, generators, fire and buildings.

Other than that, I guess we are just the same as chimps and oysters.

I'm lying down with a wet cloth on my forehead. I'm telling you, I just can't take much more of this. I just hope it's not contagious.

The Gunslinger