The Fourth Thing

Biologists tell us that all animals have three primal drives. Food, shelter, and reproduction. Being animals, this is what we are driven to do. Find food. Find shelter. Reproduce.

I believe that there's something more, a fourth drive, that makes us uniquely human. Curiosity. Along with food, shelter, and family, we seek a fourth thing. Knowledge. Turtles don't ponder the meaning of existence. Cows don't look up at night and wonder what stars are. People do. But, as Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."


He was right. We know next to nothing. We don't know what life is. Or love. Or consciousness. Or electricity. Or gravity. Or even light. We barely understand what's in our own backyards, and there's so much more out there. Think about this. In the very small town where I live, the library has 74,144 books. Just books in print, mind you, I'm not counting books on tape, CDs, or anything else they have. Just books. 74,144. If you read one book a day, for one hundred years, you won't have even reached the halfway point. The entire world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know. Even the things we think we know, we are often wrong. Everything we know about history, we've learned in the past 200 years. Compared with the billions of years our planet has been around, we've barely existed. And for most of that time, we were mute and illiterate.


Now, we have language. We have culture. We have civilization. And where has it gotten us? Nowhere. We've already started to forget. To stain English with slang. To turn art into offensive doodles. To degrade music to the point of grunting and heavy beats.

I was told once by a friend of mine that we have no purpose on Earth but to learn. I disagreed, but I understand, for isn't that what we do? Learn from everything. Hold to that thirst for knowledge! There is so much more to learn, see, and do! Knowledge is never perfect. It always entails the possibility of mistake. Risk it. It's part of being human. Knowledge is in our destinies.