The Liberating power of ignorance

Humans have been battling ignorance from the very beginning. So much has been made of the achievements that have been made possible through human intelligence that we often overlook the fact that the first humans appeared on this planet in the same condition that a newborn infant makes its entrance into this life, with one significant difference; we had not assigned teacher. The young of each species – human and nonhuman -- learn from the adults of the species, usually their parents, how to perfect the behaviors that are unique to their species and which are encoded in their DNA molecule.

It is significant that one species will not take on the unique behaviors of other species with which they share living areas. Their DNA determines how they will behave as a species. When humans arrived on the scene we knew nothing about the world around us and culturally we did not know how we should react to external stimuli. Like a newborn infant we had to learn how to respond to external stimuli but there was no one to teach us. Had it not been for the wild animals we met here we never would have made it. This is one of the unanswered questions of human evolution; one that I don’t intend to try to answer in this blog. Why does human DNA not include cultural information that would dictate how we should respond to external stimuli? This information is encoded in the DNA of all other species so why the sudden rewriting of the script with Homo sapiens?

Whatever the answer to that question may be, modern humans should be thankful that the other species with which we were to share this planet knew what to do; we have been learning from them ever since. We are not really innovators, we are the original copycats.

Who played with our DNA? Somebody must have. And whoever did, did not tell us how far or in what direction we should go in our quest, or where we should stop.