The clouds departed and Nature was glorious today ...
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Today's beauty includes lots of alligators, baby alligators, gopher tortoises, a baby gopher tortoise, birds, and the sky.
***
I was reading a book the other day titled Bozo Sapiens:
http://www.bloomsburypress.com/...
Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty woman's face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the air force's best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground? Why does giving someone power make him more likely to chew with his mouth open and pick his nose? And why is your sister going out with that biker dude?
In fact, our cognitive, logical, and romantic failures may be a fair price for our extraordinary success as a species; they are the necessary cost of our adaptability.
Now I agree with the authors that humankind errs in a myriad of different ways and that these errors are distributed throughout the population so thoroughly that they are as present in myself as in everyone else (regardless of political affiliation or any other accidental quality of a human). Where I disagree with the authors is in the claim that our species is a success, extraordinary or otherwise.
Humans have thoroughly trashed the planet and it seems altogether likely that our species isn't going to stup trashing the planet until the end of (our) time. All of humankind's accomplishments are trivial and transitory and they cannot compensate for all those things which our species has destroyed during this brief era in which humankind dominates the planet and entertains grandiose notions about its place in the Universe.
For what it is worth, Michael Kaplan has a blog:
http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com/
Not much happening there. Visit your local bookstore and read the book.
As for myself, on such a glorious day as today I must visit the beach and watch the sun set.
David Mathews
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