>>Jay Hanson: >> (a) The first step in successful problem solving is NOT having a >> hallucination ("vision") as is the current fashion. (Gee, I am in >> love with the idea of Democracy, so let's do it.) >> >> (b) The first step in successful problem solving IS to analyze the >> nature of the problem (ask any engineer or systems analyst). >> >> (c) With respect to politics among animals (believe-it-or-not, >> people are animals), think of it as a "game management" problem. >>The goal of the game manager is to minimize the aggregate >>suffering of the herd. >Mark Measday: >does he cull himself? Logically yes and actually no? Is this not the >reappearance of what might be termed the fascist fallacy? Humanity is either going to have to answer those questions is a socially-acceptable way or perish. There are no alternatives. "We humans no longer rely on the muscle of fight, the speed of flight, or the protective mask of shape and coloring for survival. We have come to depend on intelligence for life. This is a fateful gamble. It has put at stake our collective survival, and that of the whole biosphere. "About five million years ago, the evolutionary line that led to modern humans diverged from African apes, the common ancestors of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Apes are knuckle-walking quadrupeds; Homo is an erect biped. Apes have large jaws and they have small brains (in the range of 300-600 cubic centimeters). Homo has a small jaw, and a fourfold brain size in the range of 1400-1600 cc. Most apes are adapted to life in the trees; Homo is suited to life on the ground. It is this adaptability to terrestrial life that proved to be the decisive factor in the evolution of intelligence. Why some bands of pre-hominids left the trees is still somewhat mysterious (some anthropologists maintain that they were pushed from the forest into the savannah by physically more developed arboreal primates), but once they left the trees their destiny was sealed: they were condemned to a form of intelligence -- or to extinction. The question we now face is whether the kind of intelligence that evolved is sufficient for survival into the twenty-first century. Humanity, as Buckminster Fuller said, is facing its final exam. It is an exam of intelligence: the collective IQ test of the species." VISION 2020 -- Ervin Laszlo, [1994 p. 97] Gordon and Breach 212-206-8900 Jay -- www.dieoff.org