Humanity’s accepted taxonomic classification is as follows: Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Mammalia, Order: Primates, Family: Hominidae, Genus: Homo, Species: Homo sapiens, Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens. Why double sapiens? Because we are the modern subspecies of the species that includes homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Not surprisingly it is we, ourselves, who have labelled us as such. The adjective sapiens is latin for wise, rational, judicious, sensible. Really? Talk about conceited and vain. If we were being visited by aliens — assuming such an unlikely occurrence — would they label us in such praiseworthy manner? Doubtful, I dare say.
What is the reality, and how should those eight billion-plus tailless naked primates be characterized? Let us try to unwind that questionable self-assigned encomium.
We tend to be proud of our historical achievements, and with deserved justification since they are truly noteworthy. Here are a few salient ones: the taming of fire by Homo Erectus, even before those sapiens had branched off from the genus homo, perhaps as far back as one million years ago; the invention of cave art around 50,000 years ago; the invention of agriculture at least 10,000 years ago; extraction and use of metals over the last few thousand years; the notable intellectual achievements of the great civilizations of the last three millennia culminating with the astonishing discoveries, inventions and advances of the modern age.
What we tend to ignore, suppress, deny, or forget are the repeated infringements upon those wonted manifestations of wisdom, that purported sapientia of our species. Although those collective wrongdoings may have begun millennia before, we can hypothesize a start with the elimination of our above mentioned cousins, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. It does not look unlikely that their disappearance about 40,000 years ago may have been the result of the first genocide perpetrated by our ‘doubly’ sapiens forefathers. In fact, after writing down that hypothesis, I found a recent reference to a book entitled Criminology of the Human Species by Dr. Yarin Eski from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam wherein he supports the same theory of the genocidal obliteration of the Neanderthals by our forebears. Also, our ancestors already may have set a precedent of anti-environmentalism with the eradication of a major species of mammals: the mammoths. That could have been the first example of the interminable and systematic anthropogenic extinctions that seem to be escalating at present as humanity is becoming, increasingly, a murderous infestation of this planet.
If we start with historical accounts 5,000 years ago, the litany of massive outrages perpetrated within our species by one culture against another becomes interminable. The common denominator was, in most cases, the enmity against the “other”, a form of tribalism that, probably, originated with our primate ancestors. For the last 3,000 years, or so, that tribalism has gradually been complemented by religiously driven enmities as well as nationalistic and politically inspired confrontations. Any perceived collective differentiation has become the trigger and justification for increasingly lethal strife while advancing science and technology has been coopted in the service of mutual destruction.
The horrific magnitude of the human cost of the two World Wars of the 20th century illustrates the culmination of that bloody history. It is estimated that the total number of deaths caused by WWI was about 20 million and those as a result of WWII, close to 80 million. The additional collateral sufferings accompanying these conflagrations cannot even be estimated.
The fact that even a remote probability exists for a third world war involving the use of nuclear weapons leads to the conclusion that we have to seriously question the applicability of any sapientia to our species.
Now, let us take a look at the reality of that claim of collective wisdom. How pervasive is that purported trait of utilizing knowledge and experience with common sense and insight? In my view, key ingredients for such rationality are intelligence and culture. The former may be considered innate whereas the latter is acquired. When the two converge, we could expect rational behavior. Now, based on those premises, what corollary can we derive for our species? I submit that one arrives at a rather disheartening conclusion.
On the characterization of intelligence I will be wading into quicksand territory. Let me make a bold step and accept, for the sake of argument, the controversial concept of intelligence quotient, the IQ. We know that it is far from perfect but, in the present context, it may be helpful. Assuming the normalized IQ distribution of the population with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, 16% of people have an IQ below 85 and an equal percentage, above 115. What does stand out is that, by definition, 50% of people have an IQ of less than 100. Not very encouraging, indeed.
Culture, the other main contributor of rationality, mentioned above, leads us to an even more discouraging deduction. Here are some statistics. Only 66% of adults in the world have completed a high school education. Remarkably and encouragingly, literacy rate for all males and females, at least 15 years old, in the world, is 86%, however, even in the U.S., 21% of adults are illiterate, 54% with a literacy below 6th grade level. Over 50% of adults in America have not read a book in the last 12 months.
I will dare to superimpose those two rationality factors and reach the depressing corollary that about at least half of humanity lacks the tools required for good judgment, logic thinking and wisdom, the ingredients of our supposed sapientia.
Can we identify specific sets of beliefs that would support that conclusion? Here, I must confess my personal bias. Any belief in the supernatural, in the unproven, in faith based concepts, in unfalsifiable theories and phenomena, and pseudo-scientific ideas are symptomatic indicants of irrationality.
For me, for example, the fact that 83% of humanity believes in a god, and 51% in an afterlife are unequivocal proof of irrationality by the majority on this planet. In India, now the most populous country in the world, about half the population believes in astrology and 70% in predestination. In China, a large fraction, perhaps as much as 90% believe in astrology. Only 48% in the U.S. accept evolution. And here is an example of a nation imbued with religion: Ireland; in 1990, 90% of Irish Catholics believed in life after death, 55% in the reality of Hell and 58 per cent in the Devil as a real person[1]. What do these numbers tell us? The conclusion, to me, seems obvious: Irrationality appears to be the default mode of our sapiens sapiens subspecies. Only through enlightened education can we hope to overcome that, apparently, innate tendency.
This sweeping conclusion is more than confirmed when, for example, we consider that the majority of U.S. voters enthroned a human travesty as president in 2016 and an even larger number almost repeated that feat in 2020. What message is encrypted in the fanatical approval and admiration of an Adolf Hitler by millions of Germans in the 1930s? Certainly not of a preponderance of rationality.
Need I add the interminable list of such collective — past and present — manifestations that negate any claim to collective wisdom?
The conclusion that I reach about the innate tendency to irrationality of our species is, unfortunately, not devoid of consequences. It is not merely a disturbing result. It can — and it may — lead to catastrophic outcomes.
Given the relentlessly increasing population and the ever more lethal weapons of war at the disposal of that augmenting number of inhabitants, we must entertain the possibility of a dire future. Even in the absence of open large scale warfare, what prospect can we expect from the fact that in the U.S. there are more firearms in the hands of civilians than the total population of this country, including children? That statistic alone, combined with the predominant irrationality identified above, makes for a frightening scenario. Equally, what are we to expect of a country where there are 78,000 licensed gun dealers which amounts to more than all the McDonald, Burger King, Subway and Wendy locations combined! And this does not even include all those unlicensed gun traders.
Thus, here is the overarching question we are compelled to ask: Are we likely to do us in, either in the near term or in the distant future?
To respond to that momentous question, we may look beyond our planet Earth. We start with Enrico Fermi’s famous query: “Where are they?” in reference to the absolute lack of evidence of alien civilizations. How to explain that absence of vestiges, signals, and any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? Several different explanations have been proffered. Among them, a widely mentioned cause: the Great Filter.
The Great Filter would be a consequence of technology itself. Perhaps advanced civilizations usually eradicate themselves via some sort of technology run amok, such as malevolent artificial intelligence, environmental degradation, climate catastrophe, nanotechnology, uncontrolled genetic experimentation, or a doomsday machine. Humanity is already more than capable of destroying itself via global thermonuclear war. And sadly, it’s possible that such extinction events are virtually inevitable throughout the cosmos.
I, personally, do not subscribe to the universality of such tendency. I can certainly see the possibility of such a phenomenon, but not its universal inevitability. There could well be extraterrestrial civilizations — if they exist at all — that follow that course to self-destruction, but to conclude that it applies to all of them stretches my credulity. The case of our planet, however, may in the end become a nefarious example of that Great Filter.
Let us hope that we collectively survive until we have reached that, presently insufficient, level of rationality required for our long term continuance.
How to achieve that desideratum? I believe through early obligatory enlightened education, before any intellectual inroads of the regressive irrational childhood brainwashing that predominates worldwide at present.
I fully realize that such an approach may well be quixotic but it may be the only path that can shield humanity from its eventual demise. We have the means today for the effective dissemination of constructive knowledge throughout humanity, although those means are now too often used for the dispersal of obfuscation, conspiracies and outright lies, a trend that compounds and sustains that nefarious tendency towards irrationality[2].
[1] Fintan Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves.
[2] Apple News, a widely distributed and read internet news channel publishes daily horoscopes, as well as articles advising travel destinations and food selections based on Zodiacal signs.
Pedro Lilienfeld 
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