I am sick of being insulted. There seems to be a competition among some contemporary thinkers to dream up the most hostile descriptions of Homo sapiens, a species of which I am proud to be an example. Admittedly, badmouthing humanity is not an entirely novel pastime. There is a venerable religious tradition of currying favour with the Almighty by self-abasement, telling him (in case he had forgotten) what third-rate, degraded, fallen, creatures he has created. The female of the species tends to be particularly singled out. Augustine's description of women as “bags of excrement” is a characteristic gallantry. In recent centuries, however, the insults seem to be coming from non-religious sources and inspired by the claim that science has revealed our true standing in the order of things.

Voltaire got things off to a jolly start, quite a while back, by instructing the eponymous hero of his Zadig to visualize “men as they really are, insects devouring one another on a little atom of mud”. The notion of the earth as “an atom of mud”, or at least as a not-very-special address, was prompted by a growing appreciation of the implications of the first scientific revolution.