We are not smarter than our ancestors

To the editor:

It fascinates me that humans today believe that they are wiser and smarter than our ancestors, recent and ancient. We are not. We may have more information, we do, but our fundamental intelligence remains the same.

Ask yourself, are you more intelligent than, say, Aristotle, or Solomon, or Ben Franklin, John Adams, Abe Lincoln? Of course not. Give any one of them electricity and a printing press. Give Sir Isaac Newton electricity and wow! He'd dwarf where we are today.

So, and this is my true point, discounting what these people knew to be true about being human beings because we are more intelligent is a fool's errand. We need, instead, to learn from it.

And there is the scientific principle called Occam's razor: all things being equal, the most simple answer is usually the correct answer. As a 'for instance,” give every law officer, on foot or mobile, a trained canine partner. Have you ever been confronted by a 90-pound angry dog? I have. And I assure you, running, hiding or resisting arrest would be a thing of the past. Put dogs on the streets, criminals think twice. In Ferguson, New York or Anamosa.

Steven Gray

Anamosa