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"Would you agree that there's a difference between the consciousness of humans and that of animals?"
Wow, don't hold back on the big questions, will you?

I'm not as sure about that as the tone of your question seems to assume. The thing is, if you're as sure about the omnipotence of evolution as a Christian is about the omnipotence of God then you see confirmation of it everywhere. So I can very clearly see us as more than the animals but not as different from them. Not as having acquired a quality that is totally new and different. Only the inanimate and the dead can undergo change so radical that their nature is utterly lost and they become something else…

"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are corals made;
Nothing of him doth remain
But hath suffered a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

But for we poor saps who live and breathe, we're prisoners of our ancestors, pinned to the tree of life and connected to every part of it. Much of our freedom of thought, indeed much of our thought, much of our notion of self, is illusory. We think and feel as we must through our natures, And we owe our natures to no-one but our ancestors, and they to theirs. We still carry our pre-human heritage around with us in our heads, surely? People who's embryos have gills shouldn't claim to be anything special, as I said at the vicarage tea party…

>We still carry our pre-human heritage around with us in our heads>

Phylogeny recaptitulates ontology?

That's a phrase (or something like it) that was supposed to illustrate how humans display the history of evolution during gestation.

Apparently it has been discredited due to Victorians drawing stuff they way they wanted it rather than the way it actually is.

Yet people still talk about Mammalian brain and lizard brain. There is allocortex (evolutionarily older)and neocortex (evolutionarily younger).

"So I can very clearly see us as more than the animals but not as different from them. Not as having acquired a quality that is totally new and different. Only the inanimate and the dead can undergo change so radical that their nature is utterly lost and they become something else…"

We need to agree to differ!

I don't see us as "more" than animals at all. That implies a "we're better than animals" mentality that I don't trust even one little bit. The works of Shakespeare are clearly the result of "a quality that is totally new and different". You could set the million monkeys typing for a million years and I DON'T believe they'd ever come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. There's no mathematical law (of probability) that says they must. Is that quote from the Tempest? Its pretty much the only Shakespeare (King Lear being the other, the combination of madman & his fool is irresistable to me!) I can get away with... "Filled with sights and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not".