People should be taught in school that humans are not that smart, and that there are many comparable species in intelligence. - eviltoast

This opinion is based on reading people’s thoughts on the internet and remembering what I was taught in my own time in school (where they essentially stumbled into teaching that humans were some kind of ‘peak’ of the evolutionary process)

I think people have waaaaayyyy too much faith in human intelligence and it’s leading to the destruction of the world.

1- People keep thinking a scientist or a ‘rich entrepreneur’ is going to come up with some magic bullet to save the world, if we taught more about how other animals have tools, language, larger and older and more complex brain structures than us - People might realize it’s similar to believing that dolphin will arise from the sea with some idea to stop climate change

2- we keep participating in these systems that have been created under the assumption that we are ‘making progress’. I would argue that the minority of human invention represents real progress.

3- It leads to undervaluing the earth and taking it for granted. We worship ourselves as gods (literally). Almost everything you have wasn’t invented by humans. It was the result of billions of years of selective design. Yet we teach as if things we harvest from nature were ‘invented’ by humans. In reality, we often have no way to produce or even of conceive of these things without a natural example.

Thanks for reading

  • redhydride@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Good points. It is always good to keep and educate the ideas in context. Humans are the most intelligent species based on the ability to change the environment to suit us. Human intelligence have made us extremely adaptable to extreme environments as well.

    That does not mean we’re the best at surviving on an evolutionary time scale. Many species have us beat at that.