> "The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science
> that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a
> Copernican principle, used either as a heuristic about Earth's
> position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The
> mediocrity principle is further boosted by:
>
> Fossil evidence supported by genetics concluding that all humans have
> a common ancestor about 100,000 years ago and that they share a common
> ancestor with chimpanzees about six million years ago. Therefore
> humans are part of the biosphere, not above it or unique to it.
>
> Humans share about 98%% of their DNA with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have
> actually undergone more genetic change than humans.
>
> The answering of Schrödinger's question What is Life? through the
> discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the reduction of
> life to organic chemistry, negating the vitalism of previous
> centuries.
>
> Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" suggests that consciousness
> is simply the function of the brain.
>
> When the Human Genome Project released its findings in 2003, it was
> discovered that the human genome only has 24,000 genes. As recently as
> the 1990s, humans were considered so complex as to have about 300,000
> genes.
>
> Evolutionary psychology is discovering the limits to human
> rationality, biological psychology exposes the material nature of
> cognition and moral sense with fMRI scans, economic and political
> studies find regularities in the behaviors of large groups of humans.
>
> Edwin Hubble discovered the universe is a lot larger than humans first
> thought and James Hutton discovered the Earth is a lot older. The
> Hubble Deep Field is a long exposure of thousands of galaxies, making
> it one of the best pictorial representations of the principle of
> mediocrity."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle