Bears know more about people than people know about themselves, because bears are quite happy to be bears, while people struggle endlessly to dehumanize themselves. While people indulge this peculiar blend of human insecurity and human arrogance, bears observe with the placid bewilderment of creatures that still understand play.
Consider Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins is a leader among a vast and variegated group of people who generally believe that anyone who believes in a god or practices a religion accordingly is an idiot. The basis for Dawkins' belief is science. For Dawkins and people of a similar persuasion, any human behavior that is not driven by scientific knowledge is irrational and may lead to idiocy. What frustrates, enervates, motivates, and ultimately compensates the likes of Richard Dawkins is the tendency of humans to behave in certain ways that do not comport with scientific knowledge.
Were the Dawkinses suddenly and ironically imbued with godly powers, they would undoubtedly order the universe precisely as it is, changing only humans. Instead of making humans human, the Dawkinses would make humans into scientific beings who apprehend with perfect accuracy and adroitness the empirical truth of the world. These Dawkinsian humans would know everything knowable, and lack any desire to know anything more; indeed, the concept of the unknowable would be entirely foreign to these humans, a non-concept. A rigid scientific curiosity for the unknown points toward its own obsolescence, which culminates in Dawkinsian humans. These humans would not have an imagination, for they would have no need for one. They could stand on the shoreline and look out into the sea, and what would they see: a taxonomic cornucopia spread out over a visual field of 2.9 miles or 2.52 nautical miles (depending on the height of the person and the clarity of the sky in the given moment). Dawkinsian humans would not practice religion or believe in gods, as they know all that is knowable. They would never fight or disagree over concepts, as all empirical truths would be evident to all Dawkinsian humans, and no concepts that are not empirical truths would exist. That being the case, there would be no intellectual or ideological diversity among them, which means there would be no ideological wars between them. Instead, their wars would be fought over things that contemporary humans find deeply immoral and disturbing: observations of phenotypical difference, racial difference, and disparities in physical strength or natural fitness. Indeed, all conflicts among Dawkinsian humans would be the result of, as contemporary humans would put it, racists and bigots. Without the ability to espouse differences in what Martin Luther King, Jr. would call "the content of one's character," Dawkinsian humans, red in tooth and claw as all humans, nay all creatures are, would fight, oppress, and enslave those who were, in and of themselves, through and through, empirically different looking (as no character content differences would exist). Dawkinsian humans would be ruthlessly hierarchical, for empirical differentiation necessitates hierarchies (we may not know whether Joe Montana was a better quarterback than Dan Marino, but, given a common set of metrics across-the-board, we know with certainty that David Lekuta Rudisha, the new 800m world record holder, is a faster 800m runner than former world record holder Wilson Kipketer, and is thus higher on the records list).
You may find these assumptions and extrapolations about Dawkinsian humans unlikely or unsubstantiated, in large part because, as a non-Dawkinsian human, your powers of empirical knowing are quite limited. In fact, before scientists began to pretend that the word "empirical" means "evidence-based" and not "based on human sensory perception"--that is, before contemporary humans brought about this clever shift in the etymology of the word "emprical"--human sensory perception was perceived as enough to produce reliable evidence. Now, however, the Dawkinses scorn and ridicule flawed human perception. This is why "empirical" must now mean "evidence-based" instead of "based on human sensory perception": because the transhumanist Dawkinses must elide any traces of human frailty and subjectivity that must necessarily (but unspeakably) be involved in the processes of rendering scientific evidence. In other words, the problem of humans being such unscientific beings--which, for the Dawkinses, produces so many of our disgustingly human problems--is why we need to evolve into as close approximations of Dawkinsian humans as we can. For the Dawkinses, human subjectivity is a stain best rubbed out by striving for scientific objectivity.
This is in large part what is meant by "scientific progress." More practically, "scientific progress" means the patronage of society by scientists, who scoff at any judgment that is not "empirically" derived. Our scientific patrons provide (or consume mounds of resources trying to provide) contemporary humans with various comforts and amenities, from the life-ameliorating (nicer televisions, longer-lasting batteries, etc.) to the life-changing (semiconductors, electronic networks, etc.) to the life-saving (biomedical technologies, vaccines, etc.). These amenities are crucial to "scientific progress," because while scientists are busy providing us with nice things, many are also busy theorizing the complete suffusion of all human qualities and variabilities with scientific knowledge. To put it economically: have this mechanical heart, so that you may live to see the day when we make a computer that writes better than Nabokov.
In case it hasn't become clear by now, there are two ends to scientific progress. One is the forfeiture of human intellectual diversity, creativity, and play; the other is the embarrassing realization that despite all that humans have tried to do to deny, transcend, and forfeit their humanity, it was all a big ruse, a god delusion.
To say nothing of their ethical implications, both of these outcomes sound pretty fucking boring.
By this point in the manifesto the Dawkinses are feeling attacked. The scientists who wouldn't align themselves with the Dawkinses are feeling ill-used and victimized. The armies who daily make disparaging remarks about the arts and humanities from their own positions of societal and academic privilege are incensed about the possibility that their evidence may be of an insufficient standard to convince not gods, not religious nuts, not politicians, but mainstream humans that we should all lie down for this iteration of progress. You who have become oppressors of humanity (and the humanities), who have conditioned yourselves to receive all criticisms of your scientific telos as idiocy, ignorance, anti-scientific ideology, or even an attempted resuscitation of the days when the arts, religion, and philosophy unjustly presided over the kingdom of knowledge, are modern clergy. You boffins, it's no longer you who are marginalized. The victim is yours, and the victim is play.
Claim your bits and pieces of this manifesto as you inevitably will, human as you are. But here PMB affirmeth nothing but play, that delight in endless variability and purposelessness which is the hallmark of all creatures great and small.
