If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

by Justin Gregg

Animals, on the other hand, don’t need a course correction; natural selection has already generated communicative systems that minimize the presence of bullshit. It’s us humans that need to generate new solutions to the self-destructive problems we are creating for ourselves through our capacity for lying coupled with our hardwired propensity to believe. The question is: Can we save us from ourselves before the firehose of falsehoods washes our species from this planet?

Americans love their lawns. There are 163,812 square kilometers (about forty million acres) of domestic lawns in the United States right now.3 That’s equivalent to the size of the state of Florida.

The closest you’ll get is the vast network of ancient termite mounds in eastern Brazil. These huge mounds (typically eight feet tall) crisscross an area of Brazil totaling 230,000 square kilometers, and can be seen from space.6 They are built more or less every twenty meters, and there are two hundred million of them. The termites began building these mounds almost four thousand years ago.