Homo sapiens' only real evolutionary advantage is the accumulation of knowledge and employing that knowledge with tools to adapt to new or changing environments.

Every other apex predator will have us for lunch unless we utilize these traits. And even with these skills, in an ecosystem with other apex predators, our odds of passing on genetic information go down.

That's why we kill off all the other predators. And like the other predators, we view others of our species as competing predators, so they have to be killed as well.

Pretty much all species have some sort of herding mentality, even if it is just sharing the same savannah. To make it work, our big brains created all sorts of behavioral structures (religion, laws, taboos, etc.) to protect one family (tribe, clan, village, country) from the other family (...) of human predators.

The drive to survive also drove our curiosity, knowledge, and technological expertise. We couldn't help it. The cerebral cortex and the opposable thumb are our two greatest evolutionary advantages. Use them or die.

Here's the problem. We have never made the leap from protecting the family-tribe-country to protecting the species. And I don't think we ever will. We are apex predators locked in a cage where we have eaten most of the other apex predators, consumed the raw materials we used to kill them and each other, and befouled our little nest.

Our species has always been at it's best when adapting to new environments. Or worst, when someone else was already there. We need new horizons. We are really good at it.

I've said it before, as have others, we are the yoke of an egg gestated to the point of pressing against the shell, having consumed all the nutrients within.

Perhaps we did develop too fast - propelled by greed and war, we cracked the atom too soon, exploited the new technologies of the green revolution to breed too fast, even our best efforts at wholesale same species slaughter failing to halt our success at breeding more humans.

Or not fast enough - centuries of stifling science with religious constraint, or wasting our resources protecting our resources from others in the same big boat, hurling through space, probably the only ecosystem we will ever live in.

(phew...just had to rant a bit...been a long week...)