One over-developed characteristic - the imagination that stops our intelligence being purely mechanistic - permits us to think beyond the needs of mere survival and dream of a 'better' life. Starting with just the idea of having enough food all year round, instead of bursts of plenty followed by months of near-starvation, it eventually developed into wholesale denial and subjugation of nature to provide comfort. Now we are inches away from a climate disaster which will either destroy most of us, or be evaded or mitigated by new examples of our fiendish ingenuity.

It's a sobering thought that if the dreamers had died out, life would be very different now. We would be less at odds with the Universe, for one thing!