Are We Not Men?

Okay, but this pot is still boiling: It's easy enough to talk about evolution in terms of the drive to self preservation and adaptation to environmental changes. It's much harder to talk about if you take away all terminology that represents a human value judgement. Seriously: the concepts of fitness, survival instinct, genetic kinship, herd instinct... In the end, we discover that perhaps there is a great deal in common between the way we humans and the way animals, plants, fungi, and little microscopic doodads behave. What there isn't is a clear connection to the way matter generally behaves, which is, in a manner that displays little in the way of desire, guidance, or self-determination. These are all essentially human constructs, and the whole language of evolutionary biology is dependent on these concepts, even though they have as yet no scientific basis. In fact, most people paradoxically hold the twin assumptions that

1. While animals display a variety of impulses, including survival, kinship, family values, pair bonding, social organization, curiosity, and self-awareness (whether this correlates to the human level of self-consciousness is of course a subject of debate), these traits are all fundamentally scientific in nature, derive from evolutionary origins, and any connection made to the higher faculties of human existance are pure anthropomorhism,

and

2. That although any human characteristic can just as easily be correlated to the supposed scientific rationale of evolution, and linked to survival and successful breeding tactics, nevertheless the impulses that move the human race are special, somehow, and not merely the chaotic and complex effects of molecular randomness.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.