Being born human is nothing to be automatically proud of. For all you knew, you could just as easily have been born a poodle or pit bull, a parrot, or a penguin, a pig, a platypus or a polar bear. If you ever saw your undeveloped embryo, you’d swear it was a chicken or fish, or a pollywog for that matter—but certainly not the crown of creation.

Call it luck or chance, or even fate (depending on how you feel about who or what you turned out to be), but don’t think it a miracle. Surely God has better things to do than personally see to it that you joined the billions of other humans on the planet on a one-way journey to find a meaningful life.

For most of us, the world would be better off if we hatched out prematurely, at say, the gilled or amphibian stage. If all a person does with their oversized brain is eat hot dogs and memorize baseball statistics, they might as well have been born a carp or a newt—some species evolutionarily locked into a repetitious and relatively mundane way of life.

The only thing that makes human beings any better than some sort of a lowly (but not necessarily loathsome) scavenger is the ability to improve their behavior and evolve beyond their destructive urges. For example, I used to eat meat and enjoy fishing. More on that in an upcoming post…