You misunderstand, I am saying there is no pinnacle. Man is the smartest, Gibbons are the best climbers, Gorillas are the strongest and Bonobos are the most sexually active. Picking a Pinnacle ape or primate is completely arbitrary. None! They all are equally evolved and fit nicely into the niche they occupy! True. Coyotes have expanded there range steadily and are now even invading cities. Does that make them the pinnacle of canines? No it simply means they are able to exploit a niche that man has created. The planets dominate species has been and will probably always be one or another type of bacteria. That does not mean they are some sort of pinnacle it just means they are the dominant species. The bottom line is when we say this or that animal is the pinnacle of evolution we are missing the point that evolution is ongoing for all species and as the environment changes so do the species so there is never a pinnacle.
I assume he's trying to debunk the introduction of the Great Chain of Being in what should be rational discussion of empirically discoverable facts. You can't meaningfully introduce terms like "best" (and analogously terms like "pinnacle", "devolution", "most ‘evolved’", etc.) to compare present day populations without at the very least introducing the implication of a poset relation. The Greek philosopher Aristotle introduced the strongest form of this, a scala naturae, a ladder where every being, mythological or not, existed in fixed ordering from "best" to "worse". But such a concept is neither a predictive model of any observable behavior or a descriptive model of any empirical test. It was just a popularity contest and rhetorical tool to keep the peasants (and slaves) down. A poset relation is a weaker assumption but shares the same drawbacks. So in science, "best"/"pinnacle" has no meaning until we describe a metrical relationship subject to empirical testing. "Most ‘evolved’" has no meaning because there is no ladder to ascend and "devolution" is meaningless of allegedly, but not demonstrably, moving the wrong way. Neither intelligence (notoriously hard to define and measure) or complexity (a predicable consequence of sequential adaptation of structures without fixity of purpose) are goals of natural selection, so praising some populations for achieving some measure of them is a just another value judgement without scientific merit.
Correct. So are whales. And both evolved from land animals. Fish are not mammals. Dolphins are not fish. There's no such thing as devolution. Change in evolution is continuous. To take an example, you are not the same as either of your parents. They are not the same as their parents. etc.
DNA analysis recently determined that the cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, baleen whales and the sperm whale) evolved from ancestral hippopotamuses. A likely scenario is that a group of them swam all the way down the river to the sea, liked it, and decided to stay. Eventually they developed buoyancy so they could live 100% in the water, their brain hemispheres became more autonomous so they could take turns sleeping, and their rear legs atrophied into vestigial bones connected to nothing. The cetaceans and the artiodactyls (hippos, cattle, pigs, giraffes, camels, deer and all the other even-toed ungulates) have now been combined into a single taxon: Cetartiodactyla.
