The history of human development has witnessed great progress. Human intelligence has transformed the world, making human life better, more developed and more perfect in all aspects. However, it is also humans who are also the cause of difficulties and challenges that the humanity is facing. Specifically, it is the cause of climate change, epidemics, resource depletion or the creation of weapons of mass destruction, etc. Right now, the choices we make will shape our future.

I do not claim that intelligence, however defined, has no genetic basis—I regard it as trivially true, uninteresting, and unimportant that it does. The expression of any trait represents a complex interaction of heredity and environment. [… A] specific claim purporting to demonstrate a mean genetic deficiency in the intelligence of American blacks rests upon no new facts whatever and can cite no valid data in its support. It is just as likely that blacks have a genetic advantage over whites. And, either way, it doesn't matter a damn. An individual can't be judged by his group mean.

The Intellect constitutes the raison d’être of the human condition.

There is the growing influence of biology and the application of biological principles to the human faculties, thought among the rest. Man is said to have brains because they enable him to survive. Intelligence is construed as an organic function and reason as developed or evolved intelligence.

Of course, a great deal of our onslaught on Mother Nature is not really lack of intelligence but a lack of compassion for future generations and the health of the planet: sheer selfish greed for short-term benefits to increase the wealth and power of individuals, corporations and governments. The rest is due to thoughtlessness, lack of education, and poverty. In other words, there seems to be a disconnect between our clever brain and our compassionate heart. True wisdom requires both thinking with our head and understanding with our heart.

Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

It would seem that our intelligence is the source of our unhappiness in an almost literal way; but it would also imply that our unhappiness is the source of our strength as a species.

My theory is that there is a finite amount of intelligence in a family, and you're supposed to gradually transfer it to your children over a period of many years. This is why your parents started to get so stupid just at the time in your life when you were getting really smart.

The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction — the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group.

I do not want to go into its physical reasons: the construction of the human body is different from that of carnivorous animals. But man's intelligence is such that it can be utilised to defend any-thing he does, whether right or wrong.

...there is a virtue attached to intelligence, but lets suppose that we are all intelligent enough to know that intelligence is not a virtue; that the people who made the atom bomb were very intelligent, and that really virtue resides in how we conduct ourselves...

Might human sapience be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said — “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the fifty billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.

Why is it that great men so often have mediocrities for their offspring? Is it because the gamble of the genes that produced them — the commingling of ancestral traits and biological possibilities — was but a chance, and could not be expected to recur? Or is it because the genius exhausts in thought and toil the force that might have gone to parentage, and leaves only his diluted blood to his heirs? Or is it that children decay under ease, and early good fortune deprives them of the stimulus to ambition and growth?

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.