Views from Crestmont Drive

Picking up from where I left off yesterday.

My basic summary of this book is: humans are not “stupid”; the issue is that human intelligence has both good and bad consequences, and apparently we can’t have the good without the bad. The bad is that humans don’t anticipate long-term consequences, such as climate change, and the issue is whether humanity can overcome short-term thinking to save itself. Yet the overall theme is that animals have intelligence, and consciousness, in their own way; and humans are not necessarily ‘happier’ than any of them. And many animals may long outlast the human species.

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Here’s a recent nonfiction book with a provocative thesis and some interesting points which nevertheless I give a mixed review of.

Perhaps helpful to consider scoring the book along several independent parameters, like on some of those cooking shows, e.g. Iron Chef.

The author is an adjunct professor at a university in Nova Scotia. This seems to be his first book.

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