Human beings are an exception to many general rules in biology. In many species, female mate choice alone is important; in our species, male mate cho… - Steve Stewart-Williams

Certainly, the human-animal distinction is still workable; after all, we rarely make errors in assigning entities to one category or the other. But after Darwin, the distinction suddenly seems arbitrary – as arbitrary as the equally workable distinction between, say, turtles and non-turtles.

[A] large meta-analysis by Xu et al. (N = 254,231) concluded that gay men tend to have spatial and linguistic abilities comparable to those of straight women, whereas lesbians tend to have spatial abilities comparable to those of straight men (but female-typical linguistic abilities)... Gay men were presumably subject to essentially the same gender-specific social forces as straight men, and lesbians the same gender-specific social forces as straight women. As such, the near-reversal of the usual spatial vs. language pattern is hard to reconcile with the claim that this pattern is due largely to social forces.

Around 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and almost four billion years since life first evolved, something strange began to happen: Tiny parts of the universe became conscious, and came to know something about themselves and the universe of which they are a part... Eventually, some of these tiny parts of the universe - the parts we call ‘scientists’ and ‘scientifically-informed laypeople’ - came to understand the Big Bang and the evolutionary process through which they had come to exist. After an eternity of unconsciousness, the universe now had some glimmering awareness that it existed and some understanding of where it had come from.