Homo sapiens are wise in name only
Thanks to Jenny Goldie of Sustainable Population Australia for this article from the Canberra Times. See http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/homo-sapiens-are-wise-in-name-only/2263875.aspx. Be sure to read Jenny’s letter to the editor that follows the article.
Homo sapiens are wise in name only
BY JULIAN CRIBB
19 Aug, 2011 04:00 AM
Humans can no longer lay claim to be ‘Homo sapiens’. We have not acted wisely for a long, long time.
It is time the human race had a new name. The old one, Homo sapiens – wise or thinking man – has been around since 1758 and is no longer a fitting description for the creature we have become.
When the Swedish father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, first bestowed it, humanity no doubt seemed wise when compared with what scientists of the day knew about both humans and other animals. We have since learned our behaviour is not as wise as we like to imagine – while some animals are quite intelligent. In short it is a name which is both inaccurate and which promotes a dangerous self-delusion.
In a letter to the scientific journal Nature (August 18, 2011) I have proposed there should be a worldwide discussion about the formal reclassification of humanity. The new name should reflect more truthfully the attributes and characteristics of the 21st century human – which are markedly different from those of 18th century ”man”.
To read the full article, please click here: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/homo-sapiens-are-wise-in-name-only/2263875.aspx
Jenny Goldie, LTE, published by the Canberra Times on August 23:
Stupid Man
Julian Cribb argues that we should not be called Homo sapiens sapiens or wise, wise man because we have been responsible for species extinction, carbon emissions and global warming, ocean acidification, food insecurity, the manufacture and release of toxic chemicals and the illnesses they cause, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution of rivers and oceans, loss of fisheries, soil erosion and degradation, pollution and depletion of groundwater and surface water, peak oil, scarcity of mineral nutrients, energy shortages, the nuclear threat, concentration on military science rather than life science, and continued human population growth (‘We are wise in name only’, Opinion, 19 August).
I think Cribb makes his case. Given that the last point, namely, continued population growth, is a contributing cause of all the other problems, may I suggest that Homo sapiens sapiens be renamed Homo fecundus stultus (fecund, stupid man).
Jenny Goldie
Michelago NSW 2620
September 29th, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Despite all the vendors of words, please now, hark the deafening silence regarding the science of human creatureliness and human population dynamics.
October 2nd, 2011 at 11:59 am
We hear so much self-serving chatter these days. Overly educated and obscenely enriched sycophants of greedmongering high priests of modern religion, those who worship at the altar of the global political economy, can be found everywhere in the mainstream media dazzling us with ever so attractive BS. The “smartest guys in the room” as well as charismatic, forked-tongue politicians have also been bought-and-paid-for. Because there is so much ideologically correct, politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable and culturally contrived double-speak presented ubiquitously, speaking what is true as our ‘lights’ give us sight to see what could be real, appears in and of itself as an revolutionary act. Someone else said something like this, I am sure.
There are a few questions I would like to pose. If anyone has anything to offer in response, please know your thoughts will be appreciated.
Regarding the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to close the research unit on the study of the human population. Given what we are observing now, why was that pursuit of knowledge shut down? What about the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP)? Does anyone know anything about its foundation in science? We know it was organized originally in 1928 and then reconstituted in 1947. But it is in 1969 that the IUSSP was once again reorganized, and this time in a way that is recognizable today. It is in this period of the late 1960s and early 1970s that so much adequate scientific evidence was being presented and simultaneously being willfully and ruthlessly denied by many ‘talking heads’ and other clever minions of the powers that be.
And then there is the strange moment when a Nobel Prize was seemingly out of nowhere established for the field of economics. Economics is not even a science. According to wikipedia, ” It was first awarded in 1969 to the Dutch and Norwegian economists Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch, “for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.”
On the one hand we can see the emergence of unwelcome scientific evidence from Al Bartlett, David Pimentel, Garrett Hardin, the Ehrlichs, from Alexander King and Arturo Peccei of the Club of Rome as well as vital initiatives on the threat of human overpopulation from the cartoonist J.N.”Ding” Darling and Robert Hutchens at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. On the other hand we can see preternatural thought and ideological idiocy being accorded high standing alongside and within science. That is to say, demography and economics were insinuated in and confused with science. I would submit that neither demography nor economics has science for a foundation, regardless of how successful demographers and economists have been at posing as scientists during the past 50 years. Could this be at least one way TPTB slickly deceived the world during our lifetime? Have greedmongering high priests done what was required, however dishonestly and duplicitously, to organize and manage the global political economy in a way that primarily satisfied their selfish interests? Has the nature of human nature been deceitfully defined by ‘the brightest and best’ among us in a way that serves the interests of greedmongers? Has all this been occurring before our eyes, on our watch, and no one found adequate ways to communicate loudly, clearly and often about what everyone knows: these Homo sapiens sapiens, these self-proclaimed masters of the universe, these little kings and garish emperors “have no clothes”?