So here we stand, and walk, and when agitated run, having arrived helter-skelter after 3.8 billion years of lineage endowed with no certain purpose beyond carrying still forward the vageries of mutation and natural selection, erect, bipedal, bone-strutted bags of salty water led by guidance systems engineered back in the age of Reptiles. Many of the chemicals and molecules circulating in our liquid (by weight 80 percent of the body) are roughly the same as in the primordial sea. Our thought and literature remains energized by the widespread belief that all of prehistory and history, including every great transition, somehow served the purpose of placing us upon the Earth. Everything, it has been argued, from the origin of life 3.8 billion years ago was meant for us. The spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa and around the habitable world was somehow preordained. It was meant to establish our rule of the planet with the inalienable right to treat as we please. That mistake, I suggest, is the true human condition. ~ Page 32