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Hal Crowther: ...if you polled the entire Yale class of '68, how many would express "uncertainty" about evolution? My guess is just one — the President of the United States.

Written in June. One of the most hard-hitting articles to come out of the Left in years.

The New York Times Most E-mailed Articles — I would rather not spend the next Election Day the way I spent the last one: wondering just how much to hate Ohio.

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According to Tim O'Reilly (the tech guru) this was in Stewart Brand's summary of a recent talk by Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse:

Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree [on Easter Island] justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide."

(via Brad DeLong)

Actually, I think the guy yelling "This is MY tree, MY property!" was Judge Roberts.

I talked about this question a few months ago, when I was meditating on the same general tendency for our species to ignore the big picture until it falls on our heads and crushes us. And I decided that the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island (dooming his people to starvation and cannibalism) probably wasn't thinking of anything so profound:

My guess is that he wasn't thinking about much of anything -- except maybe what he was going to eat for lunch, or whether he was gonna get laid that night, or how much his feet hurt. People don't usually think in grand, apocalyptic terms, even when they're doing grand, apocalyptic things.

But in his recent talk, Diamond apparently went beyond the lies we tell ourselves to justify the insane things we do (such as destroying the only planet we've got) to consider the question of why we continue to believe our own stupid lies:

The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer. He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests -- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past.

Ordinarily, I'd be the last one to challenge Jared Diamond's thinking -- the man is a genius. But in this case I have to wonder if he isn't overanalyzing things. Maybe the reason humans act so dumb isn't because of their intellectual frame of reference, or their clan structure, or because they lack historical awareness. Maybe people act dumb because a lot of them are dumb -- dumb as turnips. So stupid they have trouble each morning remembering that their shoes go on their feet. So mentally challenged they have to use crib notes to remember their ABCs. So monumentally dense they can't even do the job of a cable news talk show host -- or at least not properly. Borderline vegetative, in other words.

Might that not be a more plausible explanation for our present predicament then a complex failure of the intellectual substrata of our socio-political paradigm considered as a subset of the tragedy of the commons?

Maybe we're simply not smart enough to fix the massive mess we've created -- just as some of our early ancestral cousins couldn't quite make the evolutionary grade either. Take Australopithicus robustus , for example. A nice enough ape, I'm sure, but not exactly the brightest bulb in the Olduvai Gorge. When his environment changed, he couldn't adapt, until finally his last known forwarding address was at the American Museum of Natural History.

Maybe we've reached the end of our rope, too -- that is to say, maybe we've risen to a level of intelligence just high enough to create problems we're not bright enough to solve. A kind of evolutionary Peter Principle in action.

Certainly, I don't see anything about our current national leadership, or the dominant political party in America, that would disprove my hypothesis.

MetaFilter — Stones of the World. Photographed by Yoshida Tatsuya.