My greatest fear is that the Human Race fails to reach its full potential, that it wipes itself out or sends itself back to the stone age,
If humans manage to wipe themselves out, together with a large part of the ecosystem, then as a group they are not intelligent enough. Darwin Award [wikipedia.org] on steroids. I hope something better replaces them. Ants as a group have been extraordinarily successful, which demonstrate that you don't need big brains to be successful in evolutionary terms. Each generation reaches its potential by passing on genes to the next. Really good genes manipulate their environment in sustainable ways to ensure future survival of future progeny. So far, fecundity seems to be a better strategy than intelligence. I would love to be proven wrong, but I won't live to see it.
Ants are one of evolution's great success stories. Arising in the mid-Cretaceous about 120 million years ago, they now comprise a diverse assemblage of approximately 20,000 species and have colonized most of the world's terrestrial biomes. They impose a strong ecological footprint in many communities in their varied roles as scavengers, predators, granivores, and herbivores. In some tropical forests the biomass of ants exceeds that of terrestrial vertebrates by a factor of four, and their soil-turning activities dwarf those of earthworms.
(Score: 2, Touché) by pTamok on Tuesday March 04, @02:53PM (1 child)
If humans manage to wipe themselves out, together with a large part of the ecosystem, then as a group they are not intelligent enough. Darwin Award [wikipedia.org] on steroids. I hope something better replaces them. Ants as a group have been extraordinarily successful, which demonstrate that you don't need big brains to be successful in evolutionary terms.
Each generation reaches its potential by passing on genes to the next. Really good genes manipulate their environment in sustainable ways to ensure future survival of future progeny. So far, fecundity seems to be a better strategy than intelligence. I would love to be proven wrong, but I won't live to see it.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 05, @09:51PM
As background reading:
Primer Volume 16, Issue 5 pR152-R155 March 07, 2006 Open Archive, Cell Press: Ants [cell.com]