We’re Idiots!

A great quote:

People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.”  I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no.  Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce.  And then, that’s it.  You don’t need a lot of smarts.  You don’t have to do tensor calculus.  You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.”  One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”

—David Dunning

From an op-ed by Errol Morris in the New York Times

Author: Tim Erickson

Math-science ed freelancer and sometime math and science teacher. Currently working on various projects.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: