Carolina Quotes[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow.
Lewis White Beck Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Lewis White Beck, "Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life" in Extraterrestrials Science and Alien Intelligence ( Regis Jr., Edward. Ed., 1985), Part III, pp. 9-10
- year
- 1985
- locator
- pp. 9-10
Cite this record
“[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intel…” Lewis White Beck. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-0D094189A1. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/0d094189a1
More from Lewis White Beck
If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book".
It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions.
In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason. The former directs us to look for simplest causes, the later cautions us not to simplify so far that the explanation is inadequate to the facts to be explained....Parsimony is not itself a simple criterion of a good methodology; we cannot simply count the factors of explanation and say that the theory containing the smallest number is the best. The ideal of parsimony cannot be expressed without the proviso that the conditions for which it is a norm shall themselves be adequate.