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Pleading is undignified, but allow me one line: please bear with the details; they are accessible, and they are the gateway to a new world.

Even if fishes hone their adaptations to peaks of aquatic perfection, they will all die if the ponds dry up. But grubby old Buster the Lungfish, former laughingstock of the piscine priesthood, may pull through... if we are Buster's legacy... how can we possibly view our mentality as inevitable, or even probable?

Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that "humanity has in the course of its time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its native self-love": the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we are not specially created but instead descended from the animals, and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

As Freud observed, our relationship with science must be paradoxical because we are forced to pay an almost intolerable price for each major gain in knowledge and power—the psychological cost of progressive dethronement from the center of things, and increasing marginality in an uncaring universe.

Historical experiment after experiment reveals the same answer: we are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. It is tempting to... write yourself into the story as the central pattern in order to find purpose and meaning... But skeptical alarms should toll whenever anyone claims that science has discovered our deepest desires and oldest myths are true after all... a purpose-seeking animal will find itself as the purpose of nature.