Until very recently, the conviction in the radical uniqueness of the human being was generally shared. However, today, disciplines such as genetics and artificial intelligence seem to question this certainty. It is thus suggested that the human being should step down from its podium, contemplating itself as a contingent and late step in evolutionary history, perhaps surpassed and replaced by entities that will one day refer to us as we refer to species that have now disappeared. In this illuminating essay, Gómez Pin clears away the reductionist thesis, with scrupulous respect for the disciplines in which it seeks support, and proposes reasons to vindicate the exceptionality of the human animal, the weight of our fragile and abysmal intelligence: an intelligence born from life, but capable of bearing witness to it and projecting the forging of entities that could be comparable to it. T...read more