Lineaus Was Persecuted for Lumping Humans with Apes Taxon...

We’ve always perceived ourselves as somehow standing apart from the rest of nature. Encouraged by the religious belief that humans were the special object of creation, as well as by a natural solipsism that accompanies a self-conscious brain, we resist the evolutionary lesson that, like other animals, we are contingent products of the blind and mindless process of natural selection. [...] The idea that humans are part of nature has been anathema over most of the history of biology. In 1735,...

 "Natural" Classification of Species as Evidence for Evolu...

Actually, the nested arrangement of life was recognized long before Darwin. Starting with the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in ????, biologists began classifying animals and plants, discovering that they consistently fell into what was called a “natural” classification. Strikingly, different biologists came up with nearly identical groupings. This means that these groupings are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify, but that they tell us something real and fundamental about na...