He understood why the biologist liked this part of the world, how you could lose yourself here in a hundred ways. How you could even become someone very different from who you thought you were. His thoughts became still for hours of his search. The frenetic need to analyze, to atomize the day or the week fell away from him—and with it the weight and the buzz of human interaction and interference, which could no longer dwell inside his skull.

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of  knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes Between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought of as a form of child abuse.

The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.