From: Jan Matthieu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Are billions of people to be condemed to death because of YOUR
>> hundreds-of-years-old "beliefs" about "rights"?
>
>So that's civilisation for you, doing away with everything valuable people
>have died FOR in the past, like democracy for example, and indeed rights,
Let me make sure that I have this straight. Billions should be willing to
die
in the future for YOUR beliefs because millions have died in the past?
Does that make sense to you? It sure doesn't make sense to me.
They are called "sunk costs". The people who died are now dead.
So what? Why should I care what someone died for?
You are confusing your own personal political ambition with good sense.
Try looking forward instead of backwards. Think of it as an IQ test:
"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
