An 'ah-hah moment' is really quite simple.

When we watch a sporting event, like the Tour de France, let's say--human beings crossing a landscape with the help of tools--we are looking for creatures similar to us. We see, in essence, the very same being as ourselves. We feel this at a very deep level, an intuitive physical level. And we say, (like Melville), ah, you too are human just like me. (The 'ah-hah moment' is itself such a moment, recognizing what we do or think over and over again, just admitting, or seeing, the remarkable quality of nature.)

This is why we watch things. This is why we read histories. This is why we read speeches. This is why we read books and poetry, and watch movies. We are intent on recognizing our fellow species, perhaps mainly for breeding reasons. We are still deeply and organically captivated by what the creature does. There is something of 'oh, that's how I might look when I might do that,' or, 'I like doing that too.'Of course, the world is so populated, so full of our species it would seem silly for us to do so.

Another mind might simply say, 'oh, well, duh, of course...' But it's not silly. It must be something wired into our reproduction, into the survival of our species, as if we were ever recognizing who we might mate with, or who our original buddies were back in the caves we sheltered and ate in. (Did our exact species come from a breeding population of six hundred individuals, as people who make intelligent study of this sort of thing propose? That would make some sense, even if we are how many billion right now.) It is the core of why we do altruistic things, why we teach, why we inhabit the things that are good for us as a species, the arts, good nutrition, exercise, healthy lives not too far removed from nature.

We still, I hope, find ourselves beautiful and amazing. The human being, homo sapien, we know, is quite a creature.

Discrimination and prejudice, those are hard things to figure out. What made us unable to see that the other person, too, was a human being? Or does one fall into manners, even in their sweetness, that leave them on the Neanderthal's side of evolution, bound to disappear in the face of all the difficulties somehow thrown up against them, baffling them.

Or are we susceptible to being duped into believing we belong to a certain tribe, like one we participate when we go to work, but which doesn't offer much to us?