Darwin’s revolution will be completed when we smash the pedestal of human arrogance and own the plain implications of evolution for life’s nonpredictable non-directionality – and when we take Darwinian topology seriously, recognizing that Homo sapiens, to recite the revised litany one more time, is a tiny twig, born just yesterday on an enormously arborescent tree of life that would never produce the same set of branches if regrown from seed. We grasp at the straw of progress (a dessicated ideological twig) because we are still not ready for the Darwinian revolution. We crave progress as our best hope for retaining human arrogance in an evolutionary world. Only in these terms can I understand why such a poorly formulated and improbable argument maintains such a powerful hold of us today.
Stephen Jay Gould, Life’s Grandeur, Vintage, 1997, p.29