If we step outside of our chauvinistic inclination to look at evolution as a process with humans as the teleological result of its process, the unfolding story of life’s continual divergence makes even more sense. As Klink illustrates, we are but a small twig on a minor branch of the Tree of Life and not necessarily its crown.
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Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Many people, including Charles Darwin, have fallen for the fallacy that man is the ‘progress’ of evolution. Any branch of the tree of life changes when under pressure. This includes almost all branches. Very few, if any, remain static.
Speaking of remaining static, I had a creationist ask me one time if there were any forms of life that had stopped evolving. “Yes,” I told him, “The extinct ones.”
Is the human species the one who has developed the possibility to have a more complex view or representation of its environment?
If it is so, you only have to rephrase: if we “choose” to measure the evolutionary process on earth through the lenses of the complexity and variety of responses to the environment, the human species could be “probably” the “crown” of evolution.
The fact that this way of looking at the evolutionary process is self-serving doesn’t preclude its reality.
But, maybe I am wrong?