I do not believe that the categories that reflect evolutionary history violate how humans view themselves in the modern world. I believe it will enhance it and give humans a greater understanding of where they come from.
However I do think that the stance changes depending on the person’s understanding of evolution. If they were taught that humans were evolved from monkeys, than they were taught something that is false. The current standpoint on Evolution upheld by modern scientist and Anthropologist is that Humans and Monkeys did not evolve from each other, we actually just share a common ancestor. The genus Homo is thought to have split from other primates about 2.3 million years ago. The first homo sapiens lived around 780,000 years ago, and anatomically modern homo sapiens are said to have originated about 300,000 years ago.
Humans often believe that we are somehow special since we dominate the planet, we do have the largest most complex brains among other non-human primates, homo sapiens sapiens are the only genus of homo that are still alive and thriving with a population of over 7.3 billion. So since we beat every other species and escaped extinction than we must be the best. Though our ancestors escaped extinction, homo sapiens were not regarded to have the largest brain, that would belong to our cousin the Neanderthal.
Neanderthals are thought to have lived roughly 225,000 years ago until 36,000 years ago among Archaic Homo Sapiens. They had large brains that were larger than homo sapiens, they had thick bones, and they regularly hunted megafauna. They may had even had the capacity for a religion, since based on archeological evidence they typically buried their dead. Evolution is key to telling the human story, which Anthropologist are dedicated to finding. If every creature evolved, and is still evolving than humans should be counted in that evolution process.
Many people question if humans are constantly evolving than why have we not evolved into a totally different species by now, there are two ways to explain this question, Firstly, Evolution takes a lot of time, in the grand scheme of things anatomically modern humans are relatively a new species, we also reproduce rather slow compared to a fruit fly. Secondly, our gene flow is very high. It is hard to get another species if gene flow is high, we share about 99.4% of our DNA with every human living today.
