RE: Human Stupidity As The Result of Unnecessary Clutter
That is how mother nature works at all levels. Because I've visited Micropia in Amsterdam yesterday the handier analogy is with life at cellular level - at some point life was unicellular - a bit like humans trying extreme individualism. Then multicellular forms of life appeared like the Volvox - where cell specialisation was minimal . With increased specialisation the whole became more and more performant while looking at individual cells they appeared more and more "stupid" or "autistic". If you ask one of your gut cells to "fire a synapse" or send a nervous sigbal it would be utterly unable to do so but
- It has the same DNA as your neurons
- It is happily "using" and benefitting from the nervous signals by its neuronic brethren.
As onthogeny repeats phylogeny the fractal nature is at work in the human society as well.
We are gradually evolving into the "specialised cells" of the most powerful social supra organism yet allowed by a short-lived "blip" in the overall march toward ever-greater entropy .
A social supra organism whose cells ( us individuals) would not know how things actually work but will be able to use them in order to "do their part " and produce something deemed useful by somebody else.
Just like your gut cells do now. They are not more "stupid" than your neurons - they have simply got a different role in a play that is far bigger than any of them.
Very good analogy
Thank you. I've written the answer on the phone; thinking it further it would have probably been even better to replace the neuron with one of the multipotent cells of the, say, 32-cells morula stage - in order to contrast the specialised gut cell with a more versatile one :-)
That's a really interesting point, we don't all need to know everything.