Daniel Dennett
writes: In just one species, our species, a new trick evolved:
language. It has provided us a broad highway of knowledge-sharing, on
every topic. Conversation unites us, in spite of our different
languages. We can all know quite a lot about what it is like to be a
Vietnamese fisherman or a Bulgarian taxi driver, an eighty-year-old nun
or a five-year-old boy blind from birth, a chess master or a
prostitute. No matter how different from one another we people are,
scattered around the globe, we can explore our differences and
communicate about them. No matter how similar to one another buffalos
are, standing shoulder to shoulder in a herd, they cannot know much of
anything about their similarities, let alone their differences, because
they can’t compare notes. They can have similar experiences, side by
side, but they really can’t share experiences the way we do. Even in
our species, it has taken thousands of years of communication for us to
begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few
hundred years that we’ve known that we are mammals, and only a few
decades that we’ve understood in considerable detail how we have
evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple
beginnings. We are outnumbered on this planet by our distant cousins,
the ants, and outweighed by yet more distant relatives we share with
the ants, the bacteria, but though we are in the minority, our capacity
for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf the powers of
all the rest of the life on the planet. Now, for the first time in its
billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing
sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future–a comet
on a collision course, or global warming–and devise schemes for doing
something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous
system: us. (06/14/06)
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