Supererogations Quotes

“In 1967, the architect Lewis Mumford wrote of the human brain as a 'neural efflorescence' like those 'in the botanical realm', one of those 'extravagances and exuberances of nature' in which evolution overreaches itself:

The very excess of 'brainness' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive trough inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it.

This, he argued, must have proved maladaptive, thus endangering the survival of early humans. Nature's grandest flower was drooping under its own luxuriant weight. Mumford suggested that it was only by unloading and storing this 'hyperactivity' into 'cultural containers', damning up our sapient surplus in the supererogations of art and curiosity, that our species has avoided 'behaving like a racing motor that burns itself out for lack of a load'. But latent self-destructive potential still lurked just beneath the surface.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction