Sharing a recent social media reply I was inspired to make in response to the quote from eminent primatologist and anthropologist and, based on her work and media interviews, lovely human being, Dame Jane Goodall:
Notwithstanding that H. sapiens is only said to be intellectual by its own reckoning…
Definition of intellect (Merriam-Webster):
1a : the power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will : the capacity for knowledge
b : the capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed‘We’ have the ‘capacity’ but all too often fail to exploit it, whether it be acquiring ‘knowledge’ or employing ‘rational or intelligent thought’…And even then merely having the capacity for knowledge and the potential to display intelligence does not inherently imply ‘wisdom’…
When some future advanced species, yet to evolve in the next billon years, looks back (during archaeological investigations) on the short era and earthly tenure of the evolved primate referred to as H. sapiens (a period lasting perhaps less than half-a-million-years) they may well conclude that:
“…the fossil remains imply that the species had large brains, with capacity for ‘intelligent and rational thought’ but that other historical evidence implies that the species also had very little wisdom. This essentially led to its sudden decline and precipitate extinction due to a combination of ill-considered global medical intervention employed after the escape of a laboratory created hybrid-virus with a rather low mortality rate, combined with apathy and argumentation about how to deal with an impending climate disaster that rapidly made the planet inhospitable to their continuing existnece within just a few hundred years of them having contributed to the ecological imbalance through their own actions. H. sapiens persisted in maintaining obviously insupportable systems of trade and resource use that clearly indicates that a capacity for ‘knowledge and intelligence’ alone is not sufficient to ensure such a species long-term survival.”
But let’s hope there is still something we can all do to steer away from such a fate and actually step into becoming the ‘intellectual’ and ‘wise’ species that we must have the potential to become… It won’t be an easy road, that is for sure, but there are critical moments in the branching path that the journey of a species may take in its development and evolution that are typically driven by ‘nature’, instinct and unforeseen events… In the case of humanity, those opportunities to take the higher, or better road, must (possibly uniquely amongst Earth myriad inhabitants) be in our own hands… Will our intellectual capacity and potential ultimately be enough to help us evolve towards being an inherently ‘wise’ species capable of moving away from those baser instincts, selfish desires, and ill-thought out actions that could lead to our doom? Only time will tell… But a successful outcome will also necessitate personal, individual, persistent and concerted ‘positive actions’! As has been implied before we must each become the ‘change’ we wish to see in the world, and by becoming such an exemplar, try to influence those around us in order to contribute to the evolution of wisdom sufficient to complement our self-assessed intellectuality!