Woody Cavenaugh

I've been mulling this over for days and its time for me to get it out of my system. As a species we are a truly egotistical bunch. We have decided that we are the most intelligent species for precisely the same reason that all the other species knows we aren't. We even went out and defined "intelligence" in a way that put us on top. From dictionary.com:

in·tel·li·gence (n-tl-jns)
n.
1. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, especially toward a purposeful goal.
2. An individual's relative standing on two quantitative indices, namely measured intelligence, as expressed by an intelligence quotient, and effectiveness of adaptive behavior.

We decited that we were #1 on Earth mainly because of our tool use and our ability to create tools for the purpose of killing ourselves and every thing else. Nice. We are the only species on the planet who absolutely cannot survive without tools, and we are proud of this? Go out and find the most primitive tribe you can think of, I'll wait. They wear cloths of some description, they have a tool for killing animals, they have tools for making tools, they have fire, and tools to shelter them from the elements. Take those tool away and they have to go out and make more tools or die.

Lets talk about our place on the food chain. Do you know our #1 method of not being eaten by larger things? We avoid being where they are. Should that fail, we have tools guns, knives, spears that will hopefully allow us to survive an encounter with them.

This egocentric thing goes in other directions too. Ask someone in the street if the giants mentioned in Greek mythology were real and you will most likely be told "no". If you are really lucky they will offer to pray for your soul for even asking the question. Now go out and ask someone on the street if the giants mentioned in the bible were real. Most likly you will get a different answer. Funny that. I think that giants walked the earth only because so many ancient cultures mention them. Same with little people. Most cultures have myths of little people, the man on the street will deny it, even after some skeletons are found in an island cave.

This leads me to monsters. Monsters are nothing more than animals we haven't put in a musieum yet. Witness exibit Coelacanth. Ok, probably not the horrible man eater of lore. How about this. Today we have people claiming to have seen fantastic creatures that they swear were there. They are ignored as lunatics because there isn't one stuffed mounted, and documented in some musieum somewhere. At least the spirits of ancient seamen are exonerated by the "discovery" of the giant squid. While I am on the subject, there is no such thing as dragons right? Of course not, that would be silly. What about the musieums full of giant lizard things? Those aren't dragons, those are dinosaurs. Ohhh silly me! It should be so obvious. It is a pretty much accepted fact that man and dinosaurs never met across the dinner table. If so why do the myths and lore of so many different cultures mention them?

If monsters are animals not yet featured in a musieum than magic is nothing more than science we haven't figure out yet. I would say that if knowledge is a giant box of tangled string than we are pulling slowly on one piece and tossing asside any pieces that distract us from our one thread. Our science works this way. Do an experiment a thousand times, if the same result occures each time it is probably a fact. If once out of the thousand comes out completely unexpected, we toss that out as a mistake. If an archelogist finds something where it isn't supposed to be, it is cast asside as meaningless and work goes on.

We have an egocentric view of the way things are and are supposed to be. Anyone who tells you "We are alone in the universe" is a prime example.

Douglas Addams understood all of this when he wrote in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that man was the third most intelligent species on the planet and not the first like they believed. The book was fiction, the cutting observations that made the book a classic maybe not so much. If you are still feeling all high and mighty, when you get home from toiling at the workplace, sit down and pet your dog or cat, who has spent the same day living a life of complete luxury while you were out, and tell them how completely stupid they are.

Sara always said that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, she hoped to come back as a well loved house cat. I have to admit, it sounds better than being a middle class human. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to work to raise the money to buy cat and dog food.