We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives - Stephen Jay Gould

Nature has no automatically transferable wisdom to serve as the basis of human morality. Passive observation and unquestioned reverence for nature are no substitute for ethical philosophy.

The universe was here for whatever reason (if any) and we fit in much later. It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us…Sure we fit. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. But the world wasn’t made for us and it will endure without us.

In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.