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To start off with, a very relevant video clip that is an excerpt of "Pale Blue Dot"  by Carl Sagan, talking about humans as parochial beings in the context of the universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6P2gfhGKXk

I loved Prof. Grobstein's remark that evolution opens up new possibilities for humans, rather than shutting us down or making us "merely material" beings just like all the other animals are considered to be. Common origins/ ancestry is definitely not a bad thing - if anything, this ties us closer to the community of life at large. Personally, I think it is beautiful to think of stories such as the theory of evolution not in terms of being true or false, but as opening new lines of inquiry and new possibilities. I think it is beautiful to think of evolution as exploring possibilities for what life could be by expanding, rearranging the patterns, and trying out new things - what else could organisms, humans, and stories seek to do? Certainly, living by the same old patterns and narratives is stagnant both biologically and psychologically.

I saw an interesting quote from Neil Young - "Why are we stuck with war? Are we not supposed to evolve to a point where we don't have war?" Maybe war is an evolutionary way to keep the total number of people down, because we don't seem to really have predators, nor are we subject to the conditions of climate and shortages of food in the same way that other animals are because we have agriculture and technology to 'artificially' acquire food and have secure shelter, etc. It seems that some sort of struggle is evolutionarily necessary to achieve betterment, though I do not endorse war as such or other zero-sum games. As I wrote about in my first paper, I do not think that war or the 'Struggle for Existence' metaphor accurately characterizes all of the economy of nature, nor of human societies.