We found another "missing link" this month. Or, to be more precise, a team of Canadian and American scientists found a missing link between modern seals and their land-dwelling ancestors. A report in this week's Nature magazine described fossils of an extinct land-dwelling animal, now called Puijila darwini, discovered in the Canadian arctic. Its remarkable skeletal structure provides a spectacular demonstration of how evolution modified the limbs of a land-dwelling animal to produce the flippers of modern seals and sea lions.

So, another mystery is solved, and even more evidence is piled up in favor of Darwin's theory of evolution – as if we didn't have enough already.

But there is another "missing link" that many of us haven't found, and in many ways it is the one that matters most. It is the link that would join us the rest of the living world. We humans have a tendency to see ourselves as completely different from other animals, and the way in which large segments of the public continue to reject the theory of evolution is just one symptom of that malaise. Americans, of course, are famously skeptical of evolution, but so is a large segment of the British population – nearly 40% according to one recent poll.

No matter what you hear from anti-evolution groups in the US and UK, lack of scientific evidence isn't the problem. The discovery of Puijila darwini was just the latest in a spectacular series of fossil finds demonstrating how evolution produced the first land vertebrates, the first whales, and even the first humans. Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. No, scientific evidence isn't really what bothers most people about evolution.

What bugs them is that evolution carries with it a message they just don't want to hear. That message is that we not only live in a natural world, but we are part of it, we emerged from it. Or more accurately, we emerged with it.

To them, that means we are just animals. Our lives are an accident, and our existence is without purpose, meaning or value.

My concern for those who hold that view isn't just that they are wrong on science, wrong about the nature of the evidence, and mistaken on a fundamental point of biology. It's that they are missing something grand and beautiful and personally enriching.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instils an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant phenomenon of life.

Seen in this light, the human presence is not a mistake of nature or a random accident, but a direct consequence of the characteristics of the universe. What evolution tells us is that we are part of a grand, dynamic, and ever-changing fabric of life that covers our planet. Even to a person of faith, in fact especially to a person of faith, an understanding of the evolutionary process should only deepen their appreciation of the scope and wisdom of the creator's work.

Acknowledging that "missing link" between ourselves and the rest of the living world doesn't demean human life – it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is "grandeur in this view of life," and indeed there is.

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious – that the evidence behind it is overwhelming – it is to open one's eyes to the "endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful" that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant, in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part. In an age where our own excesses as a species threaten so much of the living world, it is about time we saw through the metaphor of the missing link, and took charge our of responsibilities to our living kin on planet earth.