Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings.
This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning
a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived.
So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

– Jane Goodall

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We humans are used to assuming that we are always the smartest ones in the room. I appreciate the distinction which Jane Goodall makes in her quote, that we are “the most clever species.”

Because clever is a short-term form of intelligence — it’s fast and facile. It’s not the sort of intelligence needed to be good caretakers, or to solve the huge problems we’ve created for ourselves and most of the rest of Life on Earth. Clever is often also self-congratulatory, and contemptuous of other forms of intelligence.

So maybe the scientists who study the intelligence of other species are more on the right track than many people think. You never know where the ideas that just might save us from ourselves will come from. I don’t think we can afford to overlook any possibility.

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