Remember who you are: a human, a lifeform who still carries echoes of the forest and deep memories of the wild. Answer this call. Respond to the mind… - Guy P. Harrison

But even bad museums can have value. The Creation Museum (Kentucky, USA), for example, may be a vulgar monument to pseudoscience and deception, but it can teach us important things about American culture and humankind in general. I visited museums in a couple of communist countries that were like supervolcanoes of absurd propaganda. But they made me think more about patriotism and the national mythologies of all countries.

Some museums are blatant trophy rooms designed to show off only the best of ourselves. This is a good thing, too. We need it. A great art museum, for example, reassures me that, no matter what comes, humankind has not been a total waste of atoms.

Evolution does not mean improvement. There is no ladder of progress, no foresight, no plan, no goal. Evolution is the unintelligent and indifferent process of life changing over time. It doesn't prepare lifeforms for the future. It can't because the future is unknown. With evolution, the only winning is being alive right now and the only losing is being extinct. Every species on Earth today is tied for first. We can't rank contemporary lifeforms as more or less evolved than others. And we can't rank the long-term survivability of species because today's big flashy advantage could be tomorrow's death sentence. The mighty human brain, for example, might turn out to be a doomsday device. If we destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons then big primate brains would have been just another evolutionary dead-end.