“ Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good. ”
[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors, and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system.
~ Nick Bostrom
Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys.
