Are we really intelligent?
Everyone says so? May be we are. But who knows, we don’t always behave like we do? Over the weekend I met couple friends who have a golden retriever. The dog had lost some weight since I last saw him; it was the chemo therapy for his cancer that had caused the weight loss.
Not too long ago I came across a statistic that alarmed me. About 50% of pets suffer from cancer! I shared this statistic with our friends and they did not seem to be too surprised. I inquired why? The immediate response was ‘the breeders over breed the pet’. ‘bet it has something to do with the diet and the lifestyle’ I said. The response was a luke-warm maybe? I know for a fact they feed the dog top quality food and have a very active lifestyle for the dog with regular walks and a daily run.
At the end of the evening on our drive back I began to wonder… aren’t the same things true of humans? Could we be over breeding too? Aren’t we supposed to be the intelligent ones, shouldn’t we be able to figure this out? Our diets are cursed with fast food; our lifestyle is sedentary in front of the idiot box and computers at work. Above all things the rate of growth in human population. The simplest way to think of is in terms of people per unit land on the planet or people per animal on the planet and that given animals are supposedly less intelligent than us humans?
So I decided to lookup the meaning of intelligence. According to the
