Thanks for the heads up Josh. I caught the end of it. I think the beavers stole the show.
I think when we find animals painting in caves, they'll be in trouble. It's ok for an elephant or gorilla to paint to save it's species, but us humans get pretty cruel when we feel threatened.
I remember in first year pyschology the lecturer used to rave on why animals were inferior to us, yet in the same sentence, would outline a conversation held over the internet with a gorilla.
The issue that always strikes me is the frog in the saucepan. Will global deforestation force some animals to evolve or is it the water boiling to slow for them to notice?
Humanity conquired the fears of the wild with concepts of god and new technologies born of science, to the point where we talk about artificial intelligence and virtual organisms, the "random data", in I Robot. We are surrounded
by humans, yet we crave attention from another species. Our inherent ability to annoy and deny each other the feelings we need.
This sort of disatisfaction with each other, I feel, drives us to build zoos, to try and teach gorillas and chimpanzees to talk to us in our own langauge and to search out intelligence life out there.
When it comes down to real concerns though, we are blind to the complexity of animal communication, which has evolved over the same if not longer period of time that humans have, and still maintains other speicies.
In killing our fear of nature, we may have left the canary behind as we continue to destroy the habitat of all the life in the Universe that we know of.
So in the intelligence stakes, every other kingdom on the tree of life seems to be winning hands down in the sustainability stakes, but this is not the intelligence we seek. What then is this higher intelligence?
The intelligence to stop us? The intelligence to save us? Or perhaps the intelligence to say "wow, we really like what you've done with the place, so why are you mob so lonely here?"
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