Ever since Homo Sapiens made their way into separating themselves from the evolutionary path of non-cognitive beings into cognitive ones, the journey has been dramatic. Nothing absolute can be said when ‘curiosity’ as a trait became part of the human genome. But thanks to evolution that it occurred, and here we are: commenting, advising, scolding, recuperating, consoling other fellow sapiens that this world biome is gentle and will not reprimand us for altering its natural course. But as Yuval Noah Harari states, the progress in technology and destruction of nature has been exponential in the last 200 years, post industrial revolution. It is this ‘curiosity’ that does not allow humans to ‘mind their own business’ leading to the abuse of the environment. If we had to live, eat and die according to the genetic instruction book, we would have never violated nature’s code of ethics.
Human progress may be graphically illustrated in the form of a popular bell shaped curve, with its initial low represented by pre-industrial revolution, its high shown by current technological revolution and the descent as manifested by ongoing climate epidemic across the world. With the legacy of ‘curiosity’, humankind is salvaging its goodwill with nature falling back to its primitive style of living.
It was the thirst for finding answers which led to separation of humans from other animals. Intellectual reasoning for all the natural (and unnatural) processes happening in nature propelled humans to the top of the biological pyramid. As Harari puts it, humans are the only animals that live in an imaginary world of their own: they created villages, cities, nations, corporations, identities, religion, penal laws, ethical codes and so on. As long as all people believe in these things, they prevail in an otherwise fragile world. The sanctity of such beliefs can also be cracked open with a new view of the world, again springing from the ‘curious’ minds.
Scientifically sound judgments about questions of life must have trailed this ‘curiosity’ but this curiosity itself was responsible for realising the uniqueness of humans and that we must have been ‘created’ by a ‘formless supreme and omnipresent’ with a focussed objective. Then some individual humans or a group of them behaved as if they had been told what those objectives were, and were tasked with achieving the outcomes. Remember that this initial reasoning for the elevation of the omnipresent to the apostheosis had stemmed from the same ‘curiosity’ trait. The sad story is, different groups of human communities formed their own unique versions of this omnipresent being which has led to current heated relationships within societies.
The free advice that every human gives to the other fellow ‘just move on’ after a stressful event, is literally true for Earth biota because ‘life’ has moved on since the first cyanobacteria appeared 3.5 billion years ago with the intervening periods of several mass extinctions. In this long geological time, humans occupy an extremely tiny timeframe. In such a short time, ‘curiosity’ of humans has inflicted irreparable damage and the time has come when Earth is throwing tantrums on us.
