| Humans exaggerate our importance to a pretty vast degree- both in the face of evolution and its products, as well as in the face of the universe as a whole (evolution). Even to attempt to quantify our creations and destructions as being "beautiful" or "horrible" is, in my opinion, taking a conceptual leap.
If you look at our species from the perspective of orbit at any distance (geo, the moon, other planets, outside the solar system ... galaxy, magellanic cluster, and on and on - the importance of humans and our strifes and struggles becomes in my opinion a lot clearer.
Consider trying to define the good and evil deeds of swarming ants around an anthill, although in our case we must give the ants significantly more sophisticated software routines. We run around, smash, take, make up stories, fantasize, all the while consuming resources (on a cellular level, organ level, organism level, family level, tribe, nation, kingdom, cultural, and ecosystem level). Different resource gathering machines gather resources in order to keep themselves alive and gather more resources. All the while, different approaches for resource control are naturally experimented with. Some of these approaches include altruism, deception, nation building, cliques, politics, economies, and cultural ideologies.
In my opinion, each of these different resource control methods is equally valuable. They are part of a greater evolutionary mechanism to create more sophisticated routines for building interactive life forms and giving those life forms more pavlovian-type influence over their surroundings. Some work, some do not. Some work for individuals while not working for societies, and so on and so forth.
In this way I do not think of man as a pimple on the ass of the universe - nor a shining light, or any other metaphor that gives us any more influence than we have. I think of man as a big collection of organized hydrogen competing for the right to control more hydrogen within self-organizing molecular systems. |