10 Reasons Why Homo sapiens Are the Worst Species on Earth
You Think Humans Are so Great, Masters of the Universe? I Beg to Differ.
Humans have the highest brain-to-body size on earth, making us, supposedly, the smartest animal around. Anthropologists have various theories about why Natural Selection might have favored these big and complex brains — tool use, the eventual development of language, as a repository for ecological information and sources of food, good puzzle-solving skills, and invention — or maybe it was just serendipity. My personal favorite possible advantage for a big and complex brain is called the Social Intelligence Hypothesis which posits an evolutionary advantage to keeping track of who is kin and who is a stranger, who is related to whom within a larger social group, and who makes for a good ally. Under this scenario, the human brain is like an ancient Rolodex (or Contacts on an app) that acts as a constantly evaluating and updating possible “good” or “bad” social partners. This all sounds great until we realize how much awfulness all that social information over the millions of years of human interaction has pitted one person against another, one group against another, and whole swaths of society against each other, especially recently in the United States.
And yet, we are so very very proud of all this brain power. While teaching 18-year-old college students for 30 years in America I saw this self-satisfaction about human brain size every time I taught Introductory Biological Anthropology when students claimed, with glee, that the human brain could solve all current and future problems and that in time, they fantasized, our brains would somehow get even bigger. Wouldn’t that be fabulous, they asked?
Instead of being proud and self-congratulatory about our species, we ought to stop and take stock of who we are — which is the absolute worst species on earth. Here are 10 reasons why I say this:
1. We are destroying our habitat and a whole planet, supposedly “our” planet, with selfish decisions aimed at making our lives easier with cars, planes, and other energy suckers such as industrial manufacturing plants that belch out a bunch of stuff that nobody needs. We don’t care. Hurricanes, fires, floods, so what as long as we, meaning that a small section of the economically privileged planet, have the consumer products we want? And we get to travel across a planet by environmentally destructive cars and planes as we welcome the End Times. What other animal has such a selfish, suicidal approach to their habitat?
2. Humans are a species that also fouls its own nest in real-time. We spread garbage everywhere, on the streets and around the countryside, without consideration of what all that garbage does to our landscape or our health, let alone our aesthetic. We consume and worship plastic that is killing the oceans and that we are ingesting every day. What idiot species embraces that sort of destructive blindness?
3. We judge our own kind and embrace divisions that make no sense. Anthropologists have repeatedly, endlessly explained that people are the same — one species, one genus, one subspecies — and that there is more genetic variation within any specific human group than between groups. But still, we persist in subdividing people into so-called “races” and then treating other “races” as unequal. As author Isabell Wilkerson has pointed out in her masterful book Cast: The Origins of Our Discontent three cultures have used historically a cast system to discriminate and control groups in their society — India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. Instead of thinking of those around us as “created equal” we embrace “less than” and “better than.” Nice work for such a big-brained species (and I mean that sarcastically).
4. We kill our own. Routinely. War, execution, murder, famine, subjugation.
5. One gender is considered the property of the other gender. Male humans have a very long history of sequestering, punishing, controlling, abusing, and dominating women making half the species on this planet live in fear or spend a huge part of their lives resisting or fleeing from that dominance.
6. One culture — Western culture, that is — has decided it is in charge of the planet, and everyone wants to be just like them. The reality is that there are 8 billion Homo sapiens sapiens on the planet, and only 1.2 billion live in Western countries (cultures). That means 6.8 billion humans live other sorts of lives. They may like our money and music but who decided they also want to be just like Westerners? They don’t. It makes sense that non-Western cultures want a few things that make life more livable such as ample food, clean water, decent birth control, and political freedom. But Westerns also have a mountain of useless junk on offer, and nobody is really interested in most of it, but this culture pushes it on everyone else.
7. For a big-brained species, we have very short memories. We quickly forget the ravages of war, the needs of those going through natural disasters, and the pain of poverty.
8. In the same way, we have little empathy for others, or it is fleeting.
9. We are unfriendly and unkind a lot of the time. In American culture, for example, there is a nod to some idea of community, but it fizzles quickly into self-interest at every turn. A Big Frighting Word for many Americans is “socialism” because they might have to share some of their largess with others less fortunate. Oh no! There certainly is no “all for one and one for all” in this culture. Only the god of individuality guides daily behavior. Nobody cares about anybody but their own family, and sometimes not even that. Selfishness is the main characteristic of many of our species, which makes for widespread greed, self-aggrandizing, and condemnation of others who do not kiss the ring.
10. This species is the stupidest species on the planet because it has learned nothing from the past and has no plans for the future. What a living (or dying) hell for our children.
Big-brained Masters of the Universe or the Worst Species on Earth? You decide.
