Understanding otherness—the anthropocentrism trap

For centuries, the position of humans as rulers of our planet has been out of dispute. This viewpoint was fundamentally
challenged by the concept of phylogenetic descendance, where humans found themselves to appear as a late step of a
gradual process. It seems that Darwin was well aware of the headwind, he would face by spelling this out, because in the
Origin of Species, he confined this aspect to a short passage in the conclusion at the very end of the book (Darwin 1859):
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation,
that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of
man and his history.” After the public had swallowed the fact that we derive from other life forms just like everybody
else, at least there remained the consolation that Homo sapiens was sketched at the tip of everything else, wide above
the lower tiers of life. In his popular seminar for the general public, Ernst Häckel (1874) coined his iconic tree that has
shaped the general view on evolution over many decades. While these anthropocentric visualizations of phylogeny
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are questioned on occasion (for a critical discussion, see Torrens and Barahona 2012), the concept they transport
has remained active. We tend to interpret along lines that are familiar to us. This works relatively neatly, as long as
we consider life forms that are close to our own, because, here, we can move along a smooth gradient of progressive
distance. Such gradients help to spot homologies. They also safeguard against mistaking apparent similarity as relatedness.