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 I'm really intrigued by what you've said about progress being a "human idea, spawned from our tendency to rank ourselves at the top of the chain." Lately, I've been thinking about the entirely "human perspective" we use to look at the world, especially when considering that "On the Origin of Species" says nothing about humans, yet managed to create intense controversy as people assumed that Darwin suggested humans were not, in fact, divinely superior. I'm also intrigued by what you've said about how we as a species are not superior just because we make machines. In fact, as some in class have already said, that might mark us as distinctly not superior, since it enables us to destroy our resources and overpopulate to the threat of extinction.

However, I can't help but think about the most basic sense of dominance: the ability to take over resources. We as a species, because of our ability to create technology, because of our rapid gestation period, because of our inherent sense of superiority, have pretty much taken the cake when it comes to dominating every other organism in our quest to take over the planet. We spread across the globe, leveling trees to build our houses, leveling earth to plant our fields. We've even begun to spread into the vastness of space, learning to colonize, finding what's out there. Does this persistent, if self-destructive, ability to spread out into and utilize our resources not make us dominant? In the sense that we lay claim to all that we touch, sending other organisms running (so to speak), are we not, in the most basic sense of the word "superior?" Our skyscrapers might not be better than beaver dams, but because of our species' sheer force of will in devouring Earth's resources, our inherent sense of manifest destiny--coupled with our ability to develop technology--I think we could argue that humans are, in fact, the dominant force at the top of the chain.