Man is, for the first time in earth history, a single species for all practical purposes dominant in every realm, commanding all resources and with the ability and means to extinguish vast numbers of other species and indeed much of biodiversity entirely and at will. Evolutionary Humanist hold that man is the most important evolutionary force in nature at the present time, and will guide the future of evolution consciously or not. And consciousness in man, its further evolution to a unified field theory of sorts is of the utmost importance.

As so eloquently stated in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s Le Phenomene Humain (1955):

"And now, as a germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.

Really I can see no coherent, and therefore scientific, way of grouping this immense succession of facts but as a gigantic psycho-biological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis, the 'super-arrangement' to which all the thinking elements of the earth find themselves today individually and collectively subject" (De Chardin, 1955).

Julian Huxley states, "man's religious aim must therefore be to achieve not a static, but a dynamic spiritual equilibrium" and in this sense, religion can be regarded as "applied spiritual ecology" (Huxley, 1992). Both Teilhard de Chardin and Huxley’s Evolutionary Humanism predate James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, and may have influenced its development. All three are visionary philosophical positions that firmly establish man within nature, as its cognitive agent, perhaps functioning as a neural network for the earth's thought processes.