Quid Homo?

Several things recently have called me to ponder what it means to be human. Apparently this is Darwin's 200 year birthday and 150 year anniversary of his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle. And President Obama's visit to the Notre Dame campus to deliver a graduation speech called the issue of human life into question. Additionally, certain movies as of recent have made me ponder what it is to be human.
It seems that humans have always pondered our being. The writers of the Bible viewed humans as the culmination of God's creation, even as being in the image of God. Greek philosophers pondered what separates us from the animals via the virtues. The Hindus and Buddhists believed that the human form was the highest form our souls could take and the only one by which we could ascend to Nirvana. Jesus refers to God as our father. Athanasius says we are made in the image and likeness of God. Thomas Aquinas refers to man as the rational animal.
Today the question is even more relevant. Genetic research shows us that we are only separated from apes by a fraction of our DNA pattern. But beyond this, the ethical problems of science denote how we conceive of the human person. Stem cell research is highly controversial. Cloning is taboo and certain medical operations are viewed as wrong.
Despite all the efforts modern scientific thought uses to show that human kind is not special, it is clear that most people don't believe that. It is as Pope John Paul II said when he declared that the Darwinian formula does not account for the sacredness of human kind. We all believe, deep down inside of us, that human beings are something greater than bags of flesh. We strive to accomplish great feats. We seek to demonstrate our individuality, our uniqueness, our special essence that identifies us as being a separate specie of the human genus. We write books, paint portraits, film movies, build towers and monuments. We seek to know everything. We look to the skies and ponder the vastness of space. We look inside of us and ponder the human mind and body. We traverse the oceans, deserts, jungles and plains detailing the vegetation and animals we discover. We markedly separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom by the vast intellectual, emotional, creative and spiritual quests we undertake.
It seems to me that most of humanity has conceived of humans as being composed of at least a soul and a body. The Greeks viewed the highest part of the soul, the Logos, as the part that lived on past life. The Romans viewed the Anima as separate from the Corpus and the Spiritus, and the part that makes us who we are. Christians view the body and soul as parts of a whole person. Buddhists and Hindus view bodies as temporal but our essence as existing afterward. Even today, we speak of perhaps being "spiritual" but not "religious."
Even in our horror we can note how the body and soul are necessary parts of the person. From time immemorial we have been frightened of disembodied spirits. Vampires, on the other hand, are soulless bodies. Other undead, such as Frankenstein's Monster, mummies and zombies are also soulless bodies. In traditional horror (as of late, horror has focused more on the grotesque and disordered rather than on the genuinely unholy) the villain has always been some unholy, fractured human.
However, lately, there seems to have been a question as to whether or not this is legitimate. Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that during the Englightenment we lost the idea of having a purpose, a telos, for our morals. However, the philosophers of that time failed to explain adequately why we would have universal laws. For all the trying, they never fully explained to what end humans are moving. Here I feel the famous pseudo-theologian C. S. Lewis' explanation of a natural law that denotes a God comes into play. All humans have inside of us a something that pushes us toward universal ends. We all have similar morals, similar goals, similar emotions for similar things. We all have souls that guide and direct us.
Thus, I have concluded that the human is not a simple body. We are not merely animals. We are not a rung on the ladder of evolution. We are the culmination of all things. We all have inside of us an essence, a great something that distinguishes us from every other creature. Our minds and thoughts, our drives and inklings, and our very selves are distinct and unique.