Community Service Radio

Tim Retallack's Thoughts!

People are not any smarter now than they've ever been. If you could take a time machine back 100,000 years and literally pluck a caveman off the tundra of the last ice age and bring him back to your house, in two weeks he'd be sitting in your recliner watching your TV, with the remote. In two months, he'd be driving your car in traffic, and in six months, he'd be fluent in English.

On the other hand, If you pulled any fourth year engineering student out of his classes at any university in this country right now and asked him to build a gothic cathedral identical to the ones built in Europe a thousand years ago, he would not have the slightest idea where to start. If you took an ensign who graduated first in his class at Annapolis, put him in a dugout canoe wth some water and some dried fish and breadfruit, and told him to navigate to an island a thousand miles away using nothing but the stars and the waves to guide him just like the Polynesians did 40,000 years ago, he'd be fish food long before he ever found it.

So the next time you start thinking you're soooo much smarter than the men who founded this country just because the lived all the way back then and you're here now, and because you watch CNN or MSNBC every night, think again. You have idea the extent of your hubris.