Entry 4 - I believe...

I believe a universal definition of intelligence is suffocating to what we human beings can do and can achieve.  This is a narrow view of life, and it is because of this narrowness  that our abilities are constantly being overshadowed by the idea that some people have ‘better’ minds than others, that the eccentric habits of some are not fit to the persona of Einstein or Martin Luther King.  According to some, if clones of these idols are not present, then humanity is clearly running on an aged assembly line of flawed goods.  The person with a knack for building houses out of mud or the person with an obsession for collecting snapple caps for the sake of their corky facts is not himself a snapple cap that should be thrown away.  Though a pincushion for laughs, that person has a unique combination of genes unsimilar to anyone else in this world; moreover, his traits allow for diversity and a specific view of the world that gives a fresh pump of fuel for progression and more hope than ever.  View this scenario in comparison to this case of a patient with diseased blood.  She has been battling this crippling of the body in vain, and would have continued to rot away if not for a fresh, undiseased supply of blood someone donated for her benefit.  A doctor pumps this blood through her suffocating veins, capillaries, and heart, maintaining homeostasis and elongating her life span. 

This photo of my professor last quarter for me shows the  importance of asking questions and standing up when our individual characteristics are not being recognized, even if these questions raising your hand in class and admitting confusion on a class topic

The nail sticking out from society is the renewed blood that allows for new innovative ideas and eventually much needed change.  Sometimes, doing things according to a monotonous routine itself becomes outdated and unreliable, giving rise to prejudice and unstimulating stagnation. The nail sticking out also contributes something else to society: happiness.  His skills are able to make him happy.  Analyze the word happy.  Happiness is doing the thing that makes you enjoy life, it is a feeling that allows for you to die one day knowing you have completed your goals, sucking as much stuff out of the experiences here on Earth as possible.  Happiness therefore relies on perception and if those nails changing the trend of things in society are proud of what they are doing, our world is harmonious, each piece of a jigsaw puzzle fitting in where he needs to fit in.  In order for the illusion of people being smarter and thus better than others to be debated and rooted out of society, these people need to define ‘better’?  Better at what exactly? Biologically speaking, this word would mean being able to survive for a longer period of time and reproducing successively.  Given that humans don't need help with this endeavor, I believe that being ‘better’ at life is what our individual perceptions of the word are.  

These Mexican wedding cookies for me represent us humans, each deserving of powdered sugar for our individual sets of genes and phenotypes

For a gas station manager, that meeting of personal expectations is serving food at a counter and giving directions to a passing truck driver.  For a molecular biologist, that term may mean winning the nobel prize in scientific advancement.  We humans need to learn tolerance and moving with the flow, allowing our individual talents to shed their true colors on society and work together to define a species a God would be proud of.