The Superior Species Complex

      Hello my name is humanity and I have a species superiority complex.  I am the pinacle of evolution ....or creation, I haven't unanimously decided yet.  Unfortunately, my neighboring species on this planet dont all feel the same.  They find me a nuisance and a danger to our planet, but honestly I couldn't care less because they are too inferior to even have a opinion.  In fact, I dont think that they can even think at all.
    We humans have a giant ego.  However, have we posibly misevaluated our superiority?  It just might be the case that we have delusions of grandeur.  Does the towering grizly bear find us more powerfull?  Does the echolocating dolphins find us persceptive?  Or does even the colony building termite find us industrious?  It seems more likely they would find us to be fragile, weak organisms hiding behind mechical tools unable to live harmoniously with nature.  But despite our less powerful bodies and deafened senses, surely we are more intelligent.   We have displayed our dominance on a global scale, building structures that scratch the sky and extending our influence into almost every corner of the earth.  All very impressive but it has been a short run.  We are barely a spec on the evolutionary timeline.  Our reign has been on the scale of tens of thousands of years and already we are in jeopardy of abruptly ending it with world altering technology and weapons.  Contrarily, great whites have been dominating the oceans for a much longer 16 million years, and if it wasn't for a that very unlucky day 65 million years ago, the earth might still be dominated by dinosaurS, who ruled for 135 million years.  We have reached such great heights, one might hope this would grant us perspective instead of pride. 
     Of course this arrogance might be apart of what makes us human.  The excertion of our will which gave us the evolutionary advantage.  Religions proclaim us made to rule over the animals, and our cultures embrace mans conquering of beasts and naturE itself.  We are a product of our perseverance and survivability through ingenuity, of that there is no doubt.  But has this survivability come at a cost.  We do not seem to be organisms that account for natural resource depletion or have any type of self regulating behavior.  In this sense we have fallen into the most common class of organism, the parasite.  We feed off the land and move on, without equilibrium or sustainability.  This is not behavior of a superior species, simply a hungrier one.  A hungrier species with enough mental capacity to make radical changes to the dinner table.  But does this mental capacity make us superior?  And what happens when our food runs out?  Will another organism a million years from now be speaking of the foolish humans who thought the world infinite and who fancied themselves royalty?  Perhaps we have mistaken our intelligence for wisdom and our prevalence for power.
    Yet there is some intangible uniqueness that man embodies.  Some ghost in the biological machine.  Many have called it a soul, consciousness, or the human spirit.  And perhaps this is simply another biological trick to ensure our survival and continual affluence.  Perhaps we are too much in awe of the outcome of a incredibly complex physical system that we label it magic,  a mistake many of our ancestors have repeatedly committed.   But even the stubbornest scientist must see there is something more there.  Something hard to grasp like water through our bare hands.  But it is surely there.  It pulls us away from a realm of experimental validation and concrete evidence, into somewhere transcendent; something unworldly.  In this place we find ourselves existentially unique.  And it just maybe that our bridging of these two worlds is what separates man from beast, this duel citizenship which makes us human.  Surely this makes us superior?  Doesn't it?...

-by: Brett Vollert