Waiting for the real human article

Lewis Thomas (1913-1993)

"We used to believe," wrote Lewis Thomas in 1986, in the foreword to Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) and Dorion Sagan,

that we arrived de novo, set in place by the Management, maybe not yet dressed but ready anyway to name all the animals. Then, after Darwin, we had to face up to the embarrassment of having apes somewhere in the family tree, with chimps as cousins.
    ..."Man's Place in Nature"...[was to] fix Nature up, improving it so that the world's affairs might move along more agreeably; how to extract more of the earth's energy resources, how to preserve certain areas of wilderness for our pleasure [emphasis mine], how to avoid polluting the waterways, how to control the human population, things of that order. The general sense was that Nature is a piece of property, an inheritance, owned and operated by mankind, a sort of combination park, zoo, and kitchen garden.
    This is still the easy way to look at the world...now we seem to be everywhere, running everything, pole to pole, mountain peaks to deep sea trenches, colonizing the moon and eyeing the solar system. The very brains of the earth. The pinnacle of evolution, the most stunning of biological successes, here to stay forever.
    But there is another way to look at us, and this book is the guide for that look. In evolutionary terms, we have only just arrived. There may be a younger species than ours, here and there, but none on our scale, surely none so early on in their development. We cannot trace ourselves back more than a few thousand years before losing sight of what we think of as the real human article, language-speaking, song-singing, tool-making, fire-warming, comfortable, war-making mankind. As a species we are juvenile, perhaps just beginning to develop, still learning to be human, an immature child of the species. And vulnerable, error-prone still, at risk of leaving only a thin layer of radioactive fossils. [pp. 10-11]

"The real human article" is, for me, an evocative phrase. I don't think the real article has arrived yet. It would be much more advanced morally, however advanced technologically it thinks it already is.  It would have developed social and political contexts in which, more or less universally, individuals subscribed to something like the New Ten Commandments and A Declaration of Animal Rights.
    But I fear that the real article will never arrive, given mankind's brief but already evidently disastrous record of success in polluting the planet and of failure to control human population. Mankind seems not to be going to have sufficient time to grow up.
    No laughter attends today's reflection.
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Footnote: For additional quotations from Microcosmos, see the eleventh comment on "Don't forget that you are..." (February 24, 2011).