Naturalism commands us to believe that mud somehow produced mind. Therefore, our ancestors are not gods or heroes but half human or less. Our long-vanished cousins were not human. We don’t experience the discovery as a profound problem mainly because we’ve never found them.
Not for want of trying. Paleontologists have long hungered for a species halfway between human and ape, to cast in the world’s face as irrefutable evidence for mud at work. And what have they found?
See also:
Pop human evolution: What multitudes believe
What to do with our education in human evolution? Stuff it!
Why didn’t natural selection prevent sister’s schizophrenia?, writer asks (Because “natural selection,” as generally understood, is a spook that can’t prevent anything.)
and
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (human evolution)