In his highly thought-provoking book Straw Dogs, English philosopher John Gray attacks the ideas of many who have claimed that humans are somehow special. He does not believe that our vision of ourselves as autonomous beings with free will is correct. In fact, our whole concept of 'I', the self, is illusory. You can open his book at any point and find startling, challenging and stimulating ideas. Here is a passage on Buddhism and meditation:

In Buddhist meditation, the adept peels away the veils of habit that shroud the senses by a practive of bare attention. Buddhists believe that by the refinement of attention we can attain insight into reality - the momentary, vanishing world that ordinary attention simplifies and makes palatable to us... The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer...

But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evoloutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.