“Yes. It is a common terrible error that any evolutionary biologist will spank one for for imagining there is such thing as a higher mammal or a lower mammal or a - and Stephen Jay Gould, the Nobel prize-winning palaeontologist, wrote a book called Darwin’s Ladder in which he tried to make the reader understand that as far as nature is concerned, all that matters is variety and what he called “arborescence”, a sort of bushiness that from each stem as much variety flows and fills its gap and that by any proper evolutionary standards, we are no more successful, no more high than a virus particularly or bacteria which flourish and do well and are unthreatened and have completely successful ways of becoming more varied and reproducing themselves and establishing themselves. And by, as I say, pure evolutionary terms, humans are no higher than a dung beetle.” — [x]