Smart as a cockroach?

By Mark Hopkins

Scientists tell us the world was dominated by dinosaurs several million years ago. They died out after a massive collision with an asteroid eons ago. We know they existed because we keep digging up their bones in various places around the globe.

One of the curiosities of the search for prehistoric dinosaurs is that we often run across evidence of other species as well, most of them long since extinct. One of those not extinct, still to be found on virtually every continent in every city of the world, is the cockroach. Yes, we still have the cockroach, who has survived millions of years while the world has changed radically many times.

The question for the human species, you and me, is, "Are we as smart as a cockroach?" The primary attribute of the cockroach is that it is adaptable. The world's climate has changed radically over the past several million years, moving back and forth from periods of glacier to rain forest to desert conditions. Many species did not adapt well to the changes in climate and have died off. Not the cockroach. That little varmint adapted to each new condition. In fact, the jury is still out, but I'm betting it would find a way to live on the moon.

By contrast, we humans hate change. Change, as we all know, causes conflict, and the greater the change, the greater the conflict. So what has changed in recent years? Here are three examples from a very long list:

1. Minorities now make up more than 50 percent of all births in the United States each year and our public school population is now more than 50 percent minorities.

2. The states of Texas, Colorado and Arizona, long part of the Republican right, have the fastest growing minority populations in the country and will most likely begin to vote on the other side of the political aisle sooner rather than later.

3. The Supreme Court ruling has changed marriage laws and at least a part of our population is confused as to who is a wife, a husband or a partner.

So what can we anticipate will be the next major change for us: driverless cars, a cure for cancer, robots in the home, a woman in the White House?

Obviously, change is ongoing and conflict will be a continuing way of life. No matter how much we might like things to be the way they used to be, that ship has sailed.

That brings us back to the cockroach. That little varmint has proved itself to be the most adaptable creature God ever made. It has withstood all kinds of change and has thrived against conditions that even the dinosaurs could not withstand. So the question for us is, "Are we as smart as a cockroach?"