The Anomaly that is Man

[Anomalocaris]

There is nothing privileged in being the first to attain a certain arbitrary milestone in natural development. Everything has a first instance in a universe evolving out of the Big Bang.

The assumption of privilege becomes even more unsupportable when you see that it is by no means clear we are the first, nor is it clear that the first is truly significantly or qualitatively different from the immediate predecessor to the first.

It's not the fact that our evolution reached an arbitrary milestone or that everything has a first instance (which is not true at all, unless you were attempting to make a different point and clumsily worded it) that makes our existence privileged. These are non-sequiturs to what I take most people to mean when speaking of our species as unique or privileged with respect to everything else known to exist. It's the fact that, perhaps for the very first time or as far as know, quite scarcely, a being came into existence that had within its possession the ability to both create and articulate meaning, using complex, syntactical language, constructing concepts that cohere with the environment to the extent that it even enables them to predict events decades and centuries (and billions of years) before their occurrence, to mention a few advantages bestowed upon us by nature that have also given us dominion over the planet. Even biological functions that we do not possess (I imagine that might be what you're thinking) become possible through extended phenotypical designs, to almost seem to eliminate all conceivable restrictions (in due time, of course). The very articulation of your statements, or any that you might think to convey, which are intended to parallel a fact about the world, have no veritable significance outside of our species. That's what I mean by privilege. No other creature on earth, or to our knowledge, beyond, even comes close to possessing this attribute, and even if others do exist, it's still indisputably quite rare.

All you've said is special is defined by how we differ from everyone else we know, and in particular how we differ from everyone we know in ways we like to be proud of, therefore we are by definition special.

I happen to think none of the traits you mention has any specialness about them. They are all likely to be mere undistinguished points somewhere along continums of different aspects of biological capabilities that, to the best of our ability to infer, the universe can and most likely have produce an almost infinite number of separate occasions. We are extremely unlikely to represent any extreme value on any of those continums. and we are also extremely unlike to be the first to every attain our point along any of the continum on which we can be measured.

In other words, nothing that we distinguish ourselves with is likely to be something other than common place in the universe, as far we our most reasonable inference of how the universe works can tell us.

We only marvel at ourselves because we are so provincial that we've never seen anything but our own cradles.