Still, people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not–speech, rationality, culture and the rest. Comparison must deal wi… - Mary Midgley

All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.

Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.

People did not proceed, as the theory of evolution really requires by demythologizing their symbolism about animals and the downward direction. Instead they resisted evolution at all costs, or accepted it with the provisio that the future was to lift them out of the degrading company that admittedly contaminated their past. The Future was seen as leading many away from the rest of nature as fast as possible, as giving him the hope of escaping continuity with it after all. Those who felt a sense of pollution at the thought of kinship with other animals could dwell on the hope of becoming less like them.