The Mediocrity Principle

The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a Copernican principle, used either as a heuristic about Earth's position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The mediocrity principle is further boosted by:

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  Fossil evidence supported by genetics concluding that all humans have a common ancestor about 100,000 years ago and that they share a common ancestor with chimpanzees about six million years ago. Therefore humans are part of the biosphere, not above it or unique to it.
• Humans share about 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have actually undergone more genetic change than humans[1].
• The answering of Schrödinger's question What is Life? through the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the reduction of life to organic chemistry, negating the vitalism of previous centuries.
  
• Edwin Hubble discovered the universe is a lot larger than humans first thought and James Hutton discovered the Earth is a lot older. The Hubble Deep Field is a long exposure of thousands of galaxies, making it one of the best pictorial representations of the principle of mediocrity.