“Templeton is, to all intents and purposes, a propaganda organisation for religious outlooks; it should honestly say so and equally honestly devote its money to prop up the antique superstitions it favours, and not pretend that questions of religion are of the same kind and on the same level as those of science – by which means it persistently seeks to muddy the waters and keep religion credible in lay eyes.”

“It’s not good enough to say there’s some mechanism such that you start out with amoebas and you end up with us. Everybody agrees with that. The question is in this case in the mechanical details. What you need is an account, as it were step by step, about what the constraints are, what the environmental variables are, and Darwin doesn’t give you that.”

The existence of nonhuman persons would fly in the face of everything our species has believed about its uniqueness for thousands of years. If an “animal” like a dolphin actually has all of the traits of a “person”, that would call for as fundamental, dramatic and unsettling a shift in how we see ourselves as abandoning a geocentric view of the heavens did. In the same way that Earth no longer occupied the centre of the universe, neither would humans. It would also call for a shift in how humans treat dolphins – and, very likely, many other nonhumans.