Thought for the Day - (Man’s Superiority?) Thursday

This examines briefly man’s stupidity and apparent route to self-destruction. Give thought to how you can tread lightly and live without adverse effect to the world or its people.

When considering the dreadful diseases BSE, CJD, TSEs in general, Alzheimer’s and the potential connection of these and Organophosphates in insecticides and fluoride and aluminium in the water supply, one begins to question man’s competence in the continuation of his/her own existence.

In essence, the world has changed little since Homo sapiens began to coexist with other life forms. We eat similar foods, flesh and vegetables, we have the same need for cover/clothing and shelter and effectively anything else is for our own comfort.

Our cunning and dexterity with tools has put us to the top of the food chain. Some schools of thought claim that our intelligence automatically entitles us to our arrogant claim to be superior species. But how does one measure intelligence?

If our ability to destroy anything we do not understand, to kill our own kind for flimsy reasons of a political or religious divide is a measure of intelligence then, yes, we are in a class of our own. But of course the ability to bully, persecute and kill indiscriminately is no measure of intelligence – but we are one of the few species on this earth to demonstrate this genetic flaw.

Going back to my introduction, even the supposedly well-adjusted and clever amongst us continually look for ways to reinvent the wheel so that we can appear even cleverer than our peers.

In all walks of life, nature treats nature; the cure for all that ails us is available in nature if we only know where to look.

In pharmaceutical chemistry man first looked at nature and identified exactly what we needed to cure a particular problem. But we blinded ourselves to the obvious, in our self-congratulatory euphoria. Most drugs are synthesised as nature-identical and the dosage can, therefore, be adjusted to suit the circumstances. So far so good, but as we know, often another drug is required to relieve the side effects of the first and then another and another. Only now are we beginning to understand that from that first natural herb, flower, and plant was a complex of other compounds that we discarded or disregarded in our haste to reach the “one true cure”. This natural complex will often be found to contain natural buffers against the unwanted reactions, of the body, to the active ingredient. We have a long way to go yet, but at least some of us are beginning to see the light.

This principle can be used as an analogy to many things that face us in life.

We have treated insect infestations with petroleum-based compounds instead of plant extracts and wonder why we have possibly created mutant genes. We use industrial waste to treat our water when natural filtration and natural biological reaction would do a better job and not create further mutant genes. We treat viral and infectious diseases with what are effectively little more than synthetically produced poisons when all the time we know that certain herbs and essential oils can do a more effective job and at the same time not allow the killer viruses and diseases to evolve or mutate into ever more resistant strains.

We burn polluting and carcinogenic fuels when the same machines can function better on biofuels.

One must ask the question – who really is the intelligent species, who are the ones bent on self-destruction because of our own stupidity.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”