Are we any smarter than a third-grader?

Is there intelligent life on earth?

That is a question raised years ago by Paul Ehrlich, the author of "The Population Bomb" and other books. It is a question worth pondering. What is the evidence for intelligent life? Homo sapiens have named ourselves "wise man," which implies a degree of intelligence and the wisdom that follows. However, over time we have been neither intelligent nor wise.

We are slow learners, for one thing. The fact that burning fossil fuels could cause the greenhouse effect and warm the planet has been known since 1896 when it was first discovered by a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius. Despite this and lots of empirical evidence of increasing CO2, storms, floods, droughts and wildfires, little has been done to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Science was invented as a method of acquiring knowledge to help sort facts from fiction by formulating and testing hypotheses by observation and interpretation. Science has improved the quality of life in many ways, but it also has had unforeseen negative impacts. For example, DDT had adverse affects on wildlife. More recently we have discovered that PFAS, chemicals which are used to make a variety of products, remain in the environment and in our bodies and can cause cancer. They are now found in all of us and likely most species on the planet.

Dig deeper: California advances a flurry of climate legislation, including drilling restrictions and clean energy goals

Another argument against intelligent life is the number of traffic deaths, which was 43,000 in 2021 in the U.S.; worldwide, that number was 1.3 million. Most of these deaths occur because people drive too fast. Every 1% increase in mean speed produces a 4% increase in the fatal crash risk. People also fail to obey the rules of the road, which are designed to promote safe driving.

During WWII, we created and used two atomic bombs to end the war. Certainly, that qualifies us as being very clever to figure out the physics of the atom. Since then we have built many such weapons which are many times more powerful than those dropped in 1945. About 13,080 nuclear warheads are ready for use in the world today possessed by 9 nationalist tribes: United States, Russia, China, and 6 others. That is enough to destroy the planet and all life thereupon. If we were truly intelligent, would we not get rid of these awesome weapons before they got rid of us?

Another piece of evidence that we lack intelligence is the way in which women have been and are treated in our society. It was only in 1920 that women achieved the right to vote in elections. Women have been treated as chattel for most of human history and continue to be treated badly in many places such as Afghanistan, where girls are denied education.

The most recent egregious assault on a woman’s autonomy occurred with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This patriarchal church denies rights to contraception and bodily autonomy. Women are nurturers in our society and are judges, lawyers, teachers, nurses, and doctors, and are equal if not better than males. So why is it that males in state legislatures feel so compelled to give the life of a zygote, a blastocyst, an embryo or a fetus priority over a post-puberty female person?

Tribalism in the past may have had some usefulness in terms of defending territories and members of the tribe. Today, tribalism is rampant in political, racial, religious and national divides. We are one species regardless of skin color or minor features or what religious tribe we belong to. Religious tribes worship in various cult theologies of a god that may exist only in imagination rather than reality. These tribal ties have caused and continue to cause wars, riots, murder and mayhem.

Finally, the world spends $2 trillion per year on weapons to defend tribal borders and to make sure some of us get the lion’s share of the world’s limited resources to keep economies ever growing on a finite planet. World spending on family planning aid was only $1.4 billion and there is an unmet need (40 percent of pregnancies are unplanned) for contraception all over the world.

The population is growing from eight billion to 10.9 billion in 2100, which affects climate change, biodiversity/extinctions, resource depletion, etc. It would take about $10 billion to provide contraception to all the world’s females. That is only 0.3 percent of the global military budget to save the planet. I rest my case and I thank you, Paul Ehrlich.

Lee W. Miller is retired senior biologist supervisor, formerly with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and a contributing writer to The Stockton Record’s gardening issue.

This article originally appeared on The Record: Forget aliens; how about we search for intelligent life on Earth?