TOP O' THE FOOD CHAIN TO YA, MATEY!

Here we are in the 21st century celebrating ourselves as usual in one way or another, congratulating humanity for being smarter than than any other life form to have developed on this small planet on the remote outskirts of a smallish galaxy located somewhere in the vast universe, we're not really sure. But is that saying all that much? Was the evolution of developing these big old brains of ours meant for anything other than survival, climbing up a few notches on the old food chain? We just don't know, do we? Our various religions are of no help at all in figuring this one out, the creeds they espouse no more than a reflection of the sensibilities of the people who founded them.

How many Chosen People can there be? How many One True Faiths? All of them, if you read their manuals. The rise of mankind has been attributed by religions as everything from depicting God as a sort of mood-swinging tinkerer/inventor trying out two test models humans in the Garden of Eden that didn't really work so well but he sort of liked them and used them anyway to giant turtles giving birth to twins that spawned the rest of us before they devoured each other in some cosmic battle, and many variations on both those themes. So one supposes that religions are not exactly detached forums from which to observe and measure human progress.

But is science much of an improvement? In the 5,000 years or so that we've been keeping track of ourselves science has alternately been a blessing and a curse. While cures for smallpox and driving in cars are good things, what about the guy who squandered his education coming up with lemon-scented toilet paper? Doesn't seem all that far evolved, that guy. And now we advance to the nuclear age, maybe playing with toys a little too complex for us to master. We hear that China has located its nuclear weapons facilities in what is quaintly called an earthquake zone. An earthquake zone? Fissionable materials sitting on top of Mother Nature's cocktail shaker? Kind of suggests that our gene pool is not exactly the Pacific Ocean, no? More like a puddle.

What comes to mind here is a room full of chimpanzees escaping their cages, putting on white lab coats and messing around with test tubes and dangerous substances. We're just smart enough to know that we can do some cool scientific things with these dangerous substances but too dumb to stop ourselves from spilling it all over the place and poisoning ourselves. And so we blame the other chimps for doing whacky and dangerous things with science but figure that our chimps are the responsible ones who will lead Chimpkind out of the dark ages and figure this world out. Not so fast, Cheetah. Sounds a whole lot like religion.

Just maybe our larger brains were an evolutionary response to our slower reflexes, smaller muscles and lack of effective claws and fangs, a genetic adaption meant only for survival that sort of got out of hand and has us imagining we're all demi-gods and sorcerers. While these brains of ours have effectively removed us from the dinner menu of large predators, they haven't prevented us from slaughtering each other with an abandon that would appall any predator worth his salt as a shameful waste of good food, killing more than you can eat in one sitting and letting all that good meat rot in the ground for the bugs and worms to eat. And having a large brain sort of guarantees that we know how very wrong this is on so many levels, but the simple truth is, we can't help it.

We can no more stop killing each other than a walrus can decide to stop eating fish or a giraffe can decide he'd like to give flying a shot like those pretty birds he sees in the treetops. So we content ourselves with inventing stuff like asbestos so our sheltered lairs don't burn down even though we know full well it will kill some of us slowly and painfully later on in life. We form armies to kill one another but lock up other people in cages when they kill without wearing a uniform. We learn how to feed lots of people and cure lots of diseases but don't share that knowledge with those who need it most. We're a pretty interesting bunch of monkeys, no doubt, full of contradictions and surprises.

We create art, write poetry and show a great capacity for kindness towards our fellow man when we're not industriously shooting each other and claiming each other's hunting grounds. We've pushed a lot of our fellow creatures into the oblivion of extinction and at the same time worry about drowning polar bears, a creature that not so very long ago considered humans an easy meal. We argue over what is right and wrong and too often pick Door # 2. We're fairly obviously not the end product here when it comes to intelligence, just the most advanced model so far. It's been an interesting adventure putting on clothes and building skyscrapers and blowing stuff up, that's for sure. It hasn't often been boring. I wonder where we're headed. Hopefully that won't be decided by fissionable materials stored in an earthquake zone.