Since that event I have signed on to the sidewalk astronomy movement, sharing the skies in the northwest Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Check out what we’ve seen at riverdaleastronomy.blogspot.com. People have loved it!

I’m not really looking at this from an evolutionary point of view, and I’m not really interested in how well-adapted other animals are. (If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be here to talk about.) Even the most adaptively evolved bacteria doesn’t have the ability to study and change its environment. It’s our ability to do that — we study bacteria, not the other way around — that makes us different. It is not the level of some creature’s evolution that interests me, but the creature’s capabilities. Nature may not agree, but I think being a thinking tool-making primate trumps eveverthing else.

“Hey!” Mr. Kendall said. “You wanna see Saturn?”
Wsam tentatively peered through Mr. Kendall’s telescope.
“I don’t believe it!” he exclaimed. “Saturn really does have a ring.”

Try it again in a few months, and let the conspiracists speculate on the “Saturn’s rings are really just a hoax” story.

Yes, brains make us very adaptable and let us occupy a great variety of ecological niches. But single-celled organisms have us comprehensively stomped on both of those measures and countless multicellular creatures occupy larger areas than we do/live longer than we do/perceive things we can’t/survive in places we can’t/etc.

Those brains are also very expensive to maintain, metabolically speaking, and the “programming” time they require is the reason why human children are so horrifically vulnerable for so long. From a long-term objective point of view, economising on brain size is often a very sensible thing for an organism to do.

Humans do not occupy the majority of the Earth’s surface; it’s under water. We only live on the skin of the onion; life continues down into the very bedrock. We exist on a tiny membrane wedged between boiling lava and radioactive vacuum, and imagine that we’re masters of the universe.

If anything is the current pinnacle of evolution, everything is: a 21st century ape or bacteria or tree is just as “evolved” as we are. The great apes aren’t humanity’s ancestors; they are our cousins. We both “descended” from the same thing; we just ended up living in different ecological niches.

How powerful of a telescope do I need to see Saturn?

I’d like to try that.

This being the International Year of Astronomy and all…

Thanks.

Yes, elephants have better trunks, birds better tails, and dogs better barks. But trunks, wings and barks don’t give those animals the abilities our brain gives us.

Are there negative implications of the word descended? I’m also descended from nomadic desert shepherds but I don’t feel either degraded or uplifted by that fact. Nor do I consider our species the pinnacle of evolution so far. Yes we have the biggest intellect, but elephants have better trunks. _We_ think intellect is more important than a good long trunk, but then we would, wouldn’t we?

(Incidentally I sometimes wonder why creationists harp on about being descended from monkeys – is it because their mental furniture can’t even address the idea that evolution also implies that we are descended from bacteria ?)