Debasis SwainDuring my visit to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, I came across this beautiful exhibit calle…
Debasis ji, the tree you stood before is a fact about biology, and the separateness you are naming is not a biological error but a psychological one — it does not begin with forgetting evolution, it begins much earlier, with a self that needs to be superior to something in order to feel secure. That self would find a reason to call itself separate even if the fossil record showed one continuous ancestry in perfect detail. So the real question is not whether humans and other species share a lineage, which they plainly do, but why a mind so capable of seeing shared origin still finds it useful to rank, use, and exclude. Notice that the division into useful and useless is not made by ignorance of science, it is made by appetite. Does your own daily dealing with animals, forests, and things treat them as kin or as material, regardless of what you can recite about the tree of life?
