> Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? "We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone. I really don't think humans

> Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? "We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone. I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history. We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions. Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once. So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do. BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.