We Are Qualitatively Different From Other Species

Now you're pointing out a minority opinion there. I think culture is still stuck in the second part of what you were saying. Originally, we thought that we were at the center of the universe. This was the religious conception of man's place in the cosmos. The Earth was surrounded by the celestial spheres, and everything was orbiting around the Earth. So we were the inheritors of the entire universe, and God had gifted us with this.

And then science showed us that, in fact, we're not at a particularly special place in the universe. This is the cosmological principle—this idea that the universe is roughly the same at every single place, and we are just one of those particularly unspecial places. And not only are we unspecial in the cosmological sense, but biologically we're nothing particularly special.

We're just on the continuum between bacterias to cockroaches through to dogs and chimpanzees. Astrophysicists absolutely love, on almost every other topic, Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was talking about how chimpanzees are a lot smarter than what we think, and chimpanzees might be thinking about all sorts of stuff, and we're just not that much better.

So this is what almost everyone thinks. But this third view that a lot of us are trying to promote now is that it's not a slight quantitative difference between chimpanzees and us. There is a continuum between bacteria to cockroaches to dogs and chimpanzees, but we're off axis. We are qualitatively different, and all you need to do is open your eyes.

You look out your window, and you look at that beautiful city that happens to be out there that cannot be explained by this gradual increase of biological complexity.