Humans are supposedly intelligent, but evidence says otherwise

Have you ever thought about how illogical we human beings are? We’re supposed to be intelligent, we have the largest brains relative to our size, and we have the ability to think a problem through, to an extent not available to any other living creature.

And then we allow those great brains of ours, to respond inappropriately, to some perfectly simple occurrence in our environment, when logic should be shouting in our ears, “Don’t be so bloody silly!”

Take flying, for instance, as opposed to travelling somewhere by car. How many of us are scared to death of going somewhere by air, when the statistics clearly show that it is something like a hundred times more dangerous to go by car! The only thing everyone grasps when a plane crashes, is the number of passengers involved (usually quite large numbers), even though the actual events themselves are really very rare. Yet car accidents involving death are happening all the time around us and we don’t notice!

Thank you very much, but I will fly every time I can, rather than hurtle about on narrow roads, with other vehicles heading directly towards me at a closing speed of approximately two hundred kilometres an hour, all of them riding on four or more bubbles of air encased in thin rubber, and possibly steered by someone too drunk to see where he or she is going.

Then we have all these so-called experts, telling us (for instance), how bad meat is for us, or eggs, or dairy products; in fact the list is almost endless – if it’s edible, you can guarantee someone, somewhere will pop to tell you how bad it is for you! But apply simple logic to their comments and you’ll start to think, “If all this ‘food’ is so deadly for us in one way or another, then how come we humans, who have been eating all of this stuff, are still here to talk and write about it? If meat is so bad, why didn’t humans cease to exist eons ago, when meat was about the only thing our ancestors had to live on, long before they began to grow cereals and other vegetable items and stopped being hunter gatherers?”

Then we have the ‘spirit world’. Some people love this subject and some make very healthy livings out of it. Yet, simple logic tells me that there is no authenticated example of a spirit existing at all. The world is just a big ball of rock, rushing about through space, which by pure chance has manufactured the right chemical mixture to produce life. Another point of logic that occurs to me regarding spirits, etc. Suppose ghosts actually existed (I don’t believe they do, but just for the moment let’s accept the human spirit is powerful enough to transcend death and appear to the living). Everyone who reckons that they have seen a ghost invariably sees a figure, or figures, dressed in some sort of historical costume, such as Roman soldiers, Nurse Nightingale or a milk-maid. Now even if I were to start believing that the human spirit is strong enough, I can’t see any possible way a Roman suit of armour can do the same, so all ghosts should logically be naked!

Another popular area for illogicality bobs up when vaccinations are mentioned. Literally millions of lives have been saved by this simple procedure since Pasteur first discovered it as a viable treatment, nearly two hundred years ago, during which time a few people have had bad experiences with the method. But all these people see are the few who failed, not the millions who succeeded!

There are many other instances of bad logic that one could report on, some of which I’m sure I’m as guilty of believing as anyone – like crossing my fingers for luck, when I absolutely know that it’s a trick which has no effect on my good fortune whatsoever. What it all boils down to, is the fact that deep in our subconscious minds we are still pretty primitive animals, and I guess there’s no cure for that!

What do you think, are humans deeply illogical creatures?