<It's a wonder that human beings ever became intelligent enough to travel between worlds.>
<Not really. I've been thinking about that lately. Starflight they learned from you. Ender says they didn't grasp the physics of it until your first colony fleet reached their star system.>
<Should we have stayed at home for fear of teaching starflight to softbodied four-limbed hairless slugs?>
<You spoke a moment ago as if you believed that human beings had actually achieved intelligence.>
<Clearly they have.>
<I think not. I think they have found a way to take intelligence.>
<Their starships fly. We haven't noticed any of yours racing the lightwaves through space.>
<We're still very young, as a species. But look at us. Look at you. We both have evolved a very similar system. We each have four kinds of life in our species. The young, who are helpless grubs. The mates, who never achieve intelligence-- with you, it's your drones, and with us, it's the little mothers. Then there's the many, many individuals who have enough intelligence to perform manual tasks-- our wives and brothers, your workers. And finally the intelligent ones-- we fathertrees, and you, the hive queen. We are the repository of the wisdom of the race, because we have the time to think, to contemplate. Ideation is our primary activity.>
<While the humans are all running around as brothers and wives. As workers.>
<Not just workers. Their young go through a helpless grub stage, too, which lasts longer than some of them think. And when it's time to reproduce, they all turn into drones or little mothers, little machines that have only one goal in life: to have sex and die.>
<They think they're rational through all those stages.>
<Self-delusion. Even at their best, they never, as individuals, rise above the level of manual laborers. Who among them has the time to become intelligent?>
<Not one.>
<They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.>
<While collectively ...>
<Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>
<So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.>