2.3. A new vision of the present - importance and limits of the scientific approach

When we take away the main legend that man projects upon himself (the weird notion that he is supernaturally different or somehow above nature) all the other legends seem to fall too. Nationalism, superiority of the races or of certain countries or cultures over others, all religions, etc. Everything falls. What remains is a long history of dealings with the world, of which we are part, we inherited it and we will make a part of it, and, probably, each of our actions, even the smallest ones, will be amplified through time. Everything we do will make a huge difference millions of years from now, if we don't know what it will be like. The only thing that seems relatively certain is that we have grown due to our amassing correct ways of dealing with the world: we have selected the ways that worked, we compiled and systematized them, and we are searching for more, we are just in the beginning. When we look at the animal history in this perspective (this time including man in the set of animals) we see that it is basically the story of fears, desires, duty, love, courage, dedication, cowardice, etc. All the feelings that make this life feel like a great adventure. This is common to most evolved animals (not only mammals but also many other species like albatrosses). The ability to predict events, to create pictures of reality, to situate events and discover cause-effect relations is also another part of animal life. But here man highly exceeds all other animals. Our distinctive mark is precisely the richness of our mental representations of the external world. (Curiously it is precisely this ability to think critically and abstractly, and which many religions despise, that separate us from animals. I know dogs that certainly have more ability to love and feel compassion than some humans.)

It is therefore to be expected that the future evolution of intelligent species such as our own will mostly depend on the ability we have to be clear about the world. This will give power to those species. But this is not enough to secure their survival. We know, by looking both at our history and to the rest of nature, that a balance has always risen that prevented one species to achieve the monopoly of resources. Will intelligent species be an exception? Well, first of all the more intelligent we are the more we will understand that we are part of an ecosystem, that we depend on living trees and clean oceans and a wide diversity of life. Intelligent beings will likely want to live in a world full of diversity, so, in that sense, they will really be as if keepers of the world, functioning like nature, preserving natural diversity. Man, on the other hand, has been more guided by greed, immediate gratification, than intelligence. Instead of trying to preserve the biodiversity like a loving father or a keeper, many men have been thinking about dollars, fame, or business in general. Animals and landscapes are many times treated as objects to be traded and profited from. This leads to blind action whose outcome can be quite surprising. If we devastate the world we will face hunger and poverty in the future and we will live in an ugly world filled with our own constructions and polluted with our dejects. On the other hand when a species is very prevalent in a ecosystem it is natural that predators slowly appear. These predators can operate at the normal physical level, like diseases, but they can also operate at the new intellectual level. Just like ideas spread (sometimes we speak of memes) at the intellectual level so too can intellectual viruses spread. Intellectual virus are lies that have high power of diffusion but also have the ability to displace truth. A society dominated by intellectual viruses is doomed to failure for its mistaken views of the world will condemn her, sooner or later, to