A modified version of this essay appeared in a ZDNet posting of mine on December 4, 2007. The writer to which I replied had used the case of pruning a tree as an example of human intelligence "improving on nature."

We must define "effective" in the "intelligence knows best" case. The limit of Intelligence is that, as the negative-feedback control system it is, it can operate, and does operate, only according to, within the limits of, That Known. (Think of a electronic phase-locked loop system, which cannot correct frequency or phase errors that are not within the loop and detectable by its phase detector.) That is to say, Intelligence cannot control events, and therefore cannot predict events, outside of the bandwidth/ability, of Perception. This is the profound danger of Intelligence: It ultimately cannot control all of the effects it causes. This is why I wrote about the dangerous limitedness of single-point solutions, and here we can expand this to include limitedly-multiple-point solutions, sought and arrived at via Intelligence: The operation of Intelligence always causes effects outside of its control.

Now consider Nature, or evolution, whatever you wish to call it. Nature as I am considering it here does not operate according to Intelligence. Rather, it operates—that is, its components and constituents interoperate—according to intrinsic properties, limitations, and boundaries. No decoupling of Effect from Cause occurs, aside from that related to spacetime effects; but these end up factoring in as well. The algae grows to the edge of its boundary conditions and no more; beyond that limit is Death or Nonthriving. The body of a given insect species assumes the dimensions supportable by its low-energy circulatory system at our atmosphere's current level of oxygenation, and no more. And so on. Every "solution" arrived at by Nature—it is always, continuously, so arriving at a solution to its own "problem"—is the most efficient possible solution of Life versus Boundary at any moment. In Nature, Action proceeds until the raw materials and conditions necessary to support it end.

Whether it so perceives or not, Intelligence, bestowed upon Creaturehood by Nature, can Perceive, and therefore can ultimately Know, little more than what its hosting Creaturehood needs to survive across spacetime. The tools Intelligence fabricates are not arrived at as large-scale solutions are arrived at in Nature through fecundity, selection, and mortality. The purpose of Intelligence is not to overcome boundaries—it cannot—but for its hosting Creaturehood to navigate Being within boundaries, within the Possible determined by its intrinsic properties and by the components and processes and conditions of Environment. There is no transcending the Intrinsic; there is only—for Life—playing more or less well with the Intrinsic and within its limitations.

And so what, then, is Creaturehood "dominance" and its value? The extent of any species is ultimately described by a finite spacetime solid bounded by the availability of necessary conditions and raw materials—physical stuff to build bodies, water, food, and energy to drive bioprocesses, over/through what we call Time. In effect, Creaturehood is a bioflow through Time. I know: We call ourselves "dominant" because we are seemingly, currently, the creature most rapidly converting Environment to Creature and/or exploiting environment in the service of Creature—because at this point the cross-section of our bioflow, and the range of conditions in which are bioflow succeeds, are greater than that of, say, that of the white-breasted nuthatch. This dominance, we tell ourselves, is based on our ability to use this self-hypnotizing thing called Technology, which equates to speedier and larger-scale dancing with, and exploitation of, Intrinsicnesses of ourselves and our environment in ways that the nuthatch—for example—doesn't. But to arrive at this point in our history and the history of our biosphere, to our so-called position of dominance, we have long been artificially overstimulating other bioflows because their native, untinkered-with output was insufficient to support the increasing cross-section of our bioflow—that is, the increasing number of contemporaneous human individuals. We have done this primarily because we abhor individual death. And yet we are just now discovering the limits of Intelligence in having done so: We have been converting fish to People so rapidly that 90% of the large fish in the sea are gone and cannot replenish themselves rapidly enough and in sufficient quantity enough to meet our demands. The world's forests are vanishing into our mills, and their land is becoming farmland that will be artificially fertilized that it might produce crops rapidly enough to meet the rising demands of human population. Desertification as a result of human water needs is rife. All of this points to the danger, the limitedness—one could even say "the unintelligent use"—of Intelligence: All along, Intelligence could, and can, control only what it Perceives and only what it Knows, while all along the effect of Intelligence in the world always was/is far beyond what it can Perceive and Know.

This worked/works as long as the accelerated demands humankind makes on Environment did/do not stress Environment's capacity to comply with demand to the point where its capacity falls: You can play with pruning trees as long as the trees can reproduce fast enough to meet their needs and your needs combined. (Think of how the internal impedance of a battery rises as its ability to source current declines.) Intelligence responds to this crisis by imagining different/faster/"more efficient" technology. Nature, which always trumps Intelligence, responds passively by re-limiting the human bioflow through the unavailability of the materials and conditions necessary to sustain it. The term "sustainable growth" is a tragic oxymoron; the correct term would be "sustainable stability."

The danger of monkeying with our genome is the biological equivalent of the danger of nuclear energy. The nuclear waste we generate can poison for tens to hundreds of thousands of years; genomic waste—the result of poisoning the Nature-achieved balance of the fabulously robust, error-corrected growth staging defined by our DNA through Intelligence-driven tinkering toward genomic outcomes only narrowly and skeletally Perceivable and Knowable by human Intelligence—may likely last until the end of Time for our species if such tinkering does not cause the end of Time for our species.

What is the alternative to employing Technology to defer mortality and discomfort by transferring mortality to other species, depletion to other processes? To accept, and live in acceptance of, what we know to be underlyingly true anyway: that some people born will live longer or shorter lives than others, that some bodies have more or fewer "defects" than others, that not everyone can reproduce, that maybe "freedom" is not being able to "go anywhere" or "do anything" anywhere at any time of year or regardless of weather—that Freedom is, rather, exploration of the largely unexplored realm called Love that has little time for the blandishments of the fantasy of Unlimitedness that unintelligent Intelligence weaves and promulgates. For living with and within the limited giftedness of What Is—in the satedness of Enough as opposed to the itch of More—is nonetheless inexhaustibly challenging, engaging, gladdening, and satisfying, if one is sufficiently intelligent to engage in and with such a life.

Our current growth has us ceasing to exercise self-destructive uses of Intelligence only when Environment has been damaged and depleted to the point where Intelligence can no longer tinker. To my thinking, the ultimate question for humankind is whether or not it will be able to choose to ongoingly live within the boundaries set by Nature or bump against them nonnegotiably hard at a large-population scale—however dazedly, angrily, disbelievingly, destructively—as a result of having become accustomed to believing it can transcend them.

Even from my citified vantage I have already seen some species encountering the second outcome as a result of operation of human Intelligence: Revisiting after thirty years forest preserves where the closest we ever got to seeing a deer was discovering a hoofprint in a streambed, I and a friend played Frisbee as three deer grazed fifty yards away with scarcely a glance in our direction. It is heartbreaking that they and we should have had to come to tolerate such proximity. They and we will not be safely, stably Home anytime soon; the operation of intelligence cannot provide a path to stability.