'... We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of wether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will NOT be answered : if it receives a definate answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the enviroment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well...'
Ernst Mayr.
An exerpt from 'Hegemony or Survival'
By NOAM CHOMSKY.
