I have come to think that 'Homo sapiens' is a species which continually creates false, or incomplete, models of reality and then attempts to force the data to fit the models (often ignoring, of course, data points which don't fit - what I call 'The Elephant in the Room' syndrome).

Examples of false and/or incomplete models are most religions and virtually all of the 19th/20th Century '-isms'. The current '-ism', which will probably lead to the extinction of 'Homo sapiens' at its own hand, is Capitalism with its monstrously absurd assumptions about resource availability, human population growth rates and the irrelevance of the biosphere and all of its components except humans. This is now an unstoppable juggernaut sliding on a slick of greed, arrogance and wilful ignorance towards a precipice.