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

by Justin Gregg

Being human and a why specialist has obvious benefits,

it’s simply not that special at all.

Nonhuman animals, according to Millikan, “generally have no interest in facts that don’t pertain directly to practical activity. They do not represent or remember dead facts.”

bullshitting might be a skill that has been selected for by evolution. A capacity to produce bullshit might be a signal to others that the bullshitter is in fact an intelligent individual.

Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2017 for their discovery of clock genes in the 1980s.

I asked my wife if, when she closed her eyes and tried to picture an apple, she actually “saw” a picture of an apple. She said she could. Everyone else I asked confirmed that they can see photograph-like images of apples in their mind’s eye, with varying levels of detail and intensity. But I see nothing. Monica was right. It turns out that I, too, have aphantasia.

Consider that a child born today is five times more likely to die in a global extinction event than in a car crash.

In the grand scheme of things, we are destined to vanish from the Earth long before either bacteria or crocodiles.