According to the eminent phrenologist Ayn Rand, phylogeny is best represented as a ladder, not as a tree or bush, as some have understood it. Standing athwart geological time at the top of the “ladder of life” is “Mankind,” in particular, white capitalists. Rand’s objective reality indicates that in the “clades as rungs” variation of phylogeny, there are grades within clades, or more aptly, rungs between rungs, due to more or less successful versions of Mankind’s singular adaptive advantage: volitional consciousness. To be fair, at the time of her writing, it was not then known that some percentage of squirrel monkeys would also volitionally drink themselves into a stupor if liquor were freely provided, and that these same monkeys would also learn instrumental behaviors to earn drinks, thus becoming classic functional drunks. Nevertheless, the a priori assumptions that Man is an infinitely rational tabula rasa operating solely on a pleasure/pain continuum, is obviously indisputable.
