Why are people so stupid? Why do people support actions and people that work against there own interests? They do you know. It is a Horatio Alger thing. Only smart people will get that reference.
Well, I chalk it up (maybe I should say chuck it up) to evolution. Yep. Most people, even really educated ones, do not understand the concept of evolution. Survival of the fittest is a rather misleading shorthand phrase. Fittest does not mean best. Fit only means having reproduced oneself biologically. If you live to pass on your traits you have been successful evolutionarily. You are fit. The fittest means leaving behind the most surviving offspring.
Intelligence is not a fit trait. At least not high intelligence. The more educated someone is the fewer children that person is likely to have. Presuming education equates at some level with intelligence, having fewer children than everyone else is going to mean there are very few intelligent people in the population.
Culture is supposed to evade this fact of life by being the way we pass on information outside of the biological dictates of genetics. Culture allows us pass on knowledge to individuals who share no family connections with us.
Basically, intelligence helps us all, but it doesn’t stop the ignorant from overpopulating the planet by at least one half.
And who am I calling stupid? You really want me to make enemies don’t you?
- Well adherents of the extremist Quiverfull brand of über-patriarchal fundamentalism for one. Actually the males in this cult are exhibiting an often-practiced male animal behavior. It is the social chador American ultra-conservative American Fundamentalism.
- Fox News watchers, secondly. ’nuff said.
- Climate change deniers.
- Namby-Pamby Democrats who try to avoid any strong and or progressive stands.
- Republicans who know they are liars.
If we do not start using the knowledge we have, then well, we deserve the massive multi-system collapse that awaits us within just a few years from economic, environmental, and climatic catastrophes.
Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe is almost certainly the next chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is an idiot.
There I ranted. You can stop holding your breath now.