>
The unstated assumption is that humans are somehow better than chimpanzees"Better" always has to carry the "at what?" part, explicitly or implicitly. There's no universal Better, thus humans aren't Better than chimpanzees - but humans are better than chimpanzees at quite a lot of things, including intelligence, learning, preserving knowledge across generations, use of tools...
> therefore that we must reverse engineer and fill in the gaps to justify this
There's nothing to justify here. We just are better - by far - than every other animal on this planet at the things that makes a species rule every other. This is an observable fact of reality. We had no contenders for this status as far as the recorded history goes. But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.
> any way of reverse engineering the random process of natural selection
Natural selection isn't completely random! If it were, there wouldn't be any complex life forms on Earth. Or, more strictly, for natural selection to be completely random, the universe would have to be a fully uniform blob of matter.
There's randomness involved in natural selection, but that randomness has a strong bias. That bias itself is the part that's interesting to understand / reverse engineer.
"Better" always has to carry the "at what?" part, explicitly or implicitly. There's no universal Better, thus humans aren't Better than chimpanzees - but humans are better than chimpanzees at quite a lot of things, including intelligence, learning, preserving knowledge across generations, use of tools...
> therefore that we must reverse engineer and fill in the gaps to justify this
There's nothing to justify here. We just are better - by far - than every other animal on this planet at the things that makes a species rule every other. This is an observable fact of reality. We had no contenders for this status as far as the recorded history goes. But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.
> any way of reverse engineering the random process of natural selection
Natural selection isn't completely random! If it were, there wouldn't be any complex life forms on Earth. Or, more strictly, for natural selection to be completely random, the universe would have to be a fully uniform blob of matter.
There's randomness involved in natural selection, but that randomness has a strong bias. That bias itself is the part that's interesting to understand / reverse engineer.