![]() We always should have been suspicious of this picture, but now we have no excuse for continuing with it. Neuroscientists, for example, sometimes compare brain-damaged adults to children and animals. Even scientists often act as if children and animals are defective adult humans, defined by the abilities we have and they don’t. In particular, the idea that children and nonhuman animals are lesser beings has been surprisingly persistent. But the intuitive picture is still powerful. Modern biological science has in principle rejected the ladder of nature. But the very word evolution can imply a progression-New Agers talk about becoming “more evolved”-and in the 19th century, it was still common to translate evolutionary ideas into ladder-of-nature terms. In fact, the bug may be better adapted-cockroaches have been around a lot longer than humans have, and may well survive after we are gone. A cockroach is just as well adapted to its environment as I am to mine. Natural selection is a blind historical process, stripped of moral hierarchy. ![]() ![]() Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection delivered a serious blow to this conception. ![]()
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