Philosophy

I am reading a new book "Hegemony or Survival - America's Quest for Global Dominance" by Noam Chomsky. This starts out with 4 intriguing paragraphs:

"A few years ago one of the great figures in contemporary biology, Ernst Mary...Speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may be favored by (natural) selection. The history of life on Earth, he wrote refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart then to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful then humans in terms of survial. He also made the rater somber observation that the "average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years.""

Chomsky continues by stating that:

"We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart the stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else."

WOW - this prompted me to sit up and ponder life over a sleepless night!