Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 133“naked ape” living in a society which was a “human zoo”(titles of books by Desmond Morris).The human media repeat day by day how animal-likehumans are, and those animalized humans, on an average,seem to care little about it. If scientists say so, it must betrue. Besides, who still cares about values, metaphysics, or– God forbid! – “mysticism”? The late Stephen Jay Gould,a Harvard biologist and science writer of world-fame, wasone of the chief propagators of the idea that human beingswere a fluke, not an inevitable outcome of increasingmammal intelligence. He wrote for instance that, if Pikaiahad not survived, we would not have been here. Pikaia, ananimal from the Cambrian era, was a soft-bodied dartingswimmer, now thought to be the ultimate grandparent ofall vertebrate animals. But if any other strategic link in theevolutionary chain had not been there before or after Pikaia,we would not have been here either!Gould: “We are here because an odd group of fisheshad a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legsfor terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirelyduring an ice age 15 ; because a small and tenuousspecies [Homo sapiens], arising in Africa a quarter of a millionyears ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook andby crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer – but noneexists.” And Richard Dawkins, whose name is now oftenassociated in importance with the name of Darwin, wrotein The Selfish Gene: “The argument of this book is that we,and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.... We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator– molecules called DNA.”15 At the time Gould wrote these words, it was not yet known that theearth had frozen over (“snowball earth”) at least two times, 2.5 billionand 800 to 600 million years ago.