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First there were some amoebas. Deviant amoebas adapted better to the
environment, thus becoming monkeys. Then came Total Quality
Management.

I'm leaving out some details, but the theory itself also has a few holes
that are best left unquestioned.

Anyway, it took us many years to get to this lofty level of evolution. That
leisurely pace of change was okay because there wasn't much to do
except sit around and hope you didn't get eaten by wild pigs. Then
somebody fell on a sharp stick and the spear was invented. That's when
the trouble started.

I wasn't there, but I'm willing to bet that some people said the spear
would never replace fingernails as the fighting tool of choice. The
naysayers probably hurled bad names at the spear-users -- names
like "moog" and "blinth." (This was before the merchant marines had been
created, so swearing wasn't very good yet.)

But "diversity" was not celebrated back then, and I expect the "Say No to
Spear" people finally got the "point" if you catch my drift.

The good thing about the spear is that almost everybody could
understand it. It had basically one feature: the pointy end. Our brains
were fully equiped for this level of complexity. And not just the brains of
the intelligentsia either - - the common man could find his way around a
spear too. Life was good, save the occasional plague and the fact that the
average life expectancy was seven... and the fact that you'd be praying
for death after the age of four. But almost nobody complained about how
confusing spears were.

Suddenly (in evolutionary terms) some deviant went and built the printing
press. It was a slippery slope after that. Two blinks later and we're
switching batteries in our laptop computers while streaking through the
sky in shiny metal objects in which soft drinks and peanuts are served.

I blame sex and paper for most of our current problems. Here's my logic:
Only one person in a million is smart enough to invent a printing press. So
when society consisted of only a few hundred apelike people living in
caves, the odds of one of them being a genius was fairly low. But people
kept having sex, and with every moron added to the population, the odds
of a deviant smarty-pants slipping through the genetic net got higher and
higher. When you've got several million people running around having sex
all willy-nilly, the odds are fairly good that some pregnant ape-mom is
going to squat in a field someday and pinch out a printing-press-making
deviant.

Once we had printing presses, we were pretty much doomed. Because
then, every time a new smart deviant came up with a good idea, it would
get written down and shared. Every good idea could be built upon.
Civilization exploded. Technology was born. The complexity of life
increased geometrically. Everything got bigger and better. Except our
brains.

All the technology that surrounds us, all the management theories, the
economic models that predict and guide our behavior, the science that
helps us live to eighty -- it's all created by a tiny percentage of deviant
smart people. The rest of us are treading water as fast as we can. The
world is too complex for us. Evolution didn't keep up. Thanks to the
printing press, the deviant smart people managed to capture their genius
and communicate it without having to pass it on genetically. Evolution was
short-circuited. We got knowledge and technology before we got
intelligence.

We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was
designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.