Any parent knows that the human child is one of the stupidest animals in the world. This is why human parenting is so hard. When a child is in the circle of care of a woman or man, that woman or man has to devote at all times a huge part of her/his brain to that child and their dumb doings, which are triggered by the oversupply of bad ideas between their little ears. And so the boy at the city zoo slips from his mother's circle of control, enters and falls into the area that confines a gorgeous and young gorilla named Harambe, and ends up in this beast's circle of power. The 17-year-old gorilla unwittingly enters the last 10 minutes of his life. The zoo officials decide to end the confusion and tension with a bullet. (For more thought on this incident, read Ijeoma Oluo's "Cincinnati zoo: every mother knows it could happen to her.")

But here is what I want to think about for a moment. The stupidity of children also happens to be the source (or, more poetically, soil) of human genius. What is our genius? We are the most social mammal. We have a sociality that even surpasses that of the ants in complexity and efficiency. But why aren't chimps and gorillas, our very close relatives, as socially rich as we are? Chimps live in small communities, and gorillas go no further than the family (one male, some females, kids—when they sleep, big father is on the ground, the rest of the family is in the tree).

The answer is the children of these apes develop much faster than those of the human one. Young chimps, for example, win their independence within a few years of life. Not so with our children. They need years of protection and development to get things straight. And this fact placed the needed pressure on us to form a sociality that extended childcare/parenting outside of not only the family but in some cases the community. (I call this the Hrdy Hypothesis, as it forms the basis for the book Mothers and Others:
The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by the sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy.)

Also, we can attribute the genius of human wonder, a wonder that led to things like Einstein's theory of gravity (it can be thought of as not caused by an attractive force but by curves in the fabric of the universe, spacetime), to the stupidity of children. When a chimp becomes an adult, he/she stops wondering about things—meaning, stops asking dumb questions. The world around them hardens and closes. All that is becomes what is and nothing more. Because human development takes almost forever, this habit of questioning often overflows into adulthood. Paradoxically, the more there is of this overflow of childish wonder (stupidity) into the adult, the less likely the adult is to vote for Trump or to believe that the universe was created by the greatest ape of all.

In the natural order of things, only children should ask why things shine in the night sky. This is not the business of an adult.