Nonetheless, it is not clear that most people have fully taken on board its implications. This suggestion is no doubt far less shocking to modern ears than it was in Darwin's day. However, if we wish to frame an objective view of the universe (i.e., a view that would be equally valid from the perspective of any species on any planet), we must view the sun as a star, the earth as a planet. The idea that humans are not animals makes precisely as much sense as the idea that the earth is not a planet, or the sun not a star.
Post-Darwin, it is more natural to think of humans as a subset of the category animal.
But after Darwin, the distinction suddenly seems arbitrary - as arbitrary as the equally workable distinction between, say, turtles and non-turtles. Certainly, the human-animal distinction is still workable after all, we rarely make errors in assigning entities to one category or the other. We are one animal species among countless millions.
We now know that we all came about through the same process, and our common origin suggests that we will have more in common with other animals than we previously imagined. It challenges the very idea that the inhabitants of this planet can be meaningfully divided into humans and animals in the first place. But Darwin's theory does more than simply stress our kinship with the animals.
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