The animal kingdoms are descriptive labels, not prescriptive ones - they're descriptive of physical characteristics, not mental ones.
And this I understand. But my point (poorly conveyed at 4 in the morning) is more that the Animal Kingdom is
very large. Insects are as much a part of it as chimpanzees are, yet the later is undoubtedly more advanced in several factors.
Are we a part of the Animal Kingdom? Yes. But that could just as easily be called the "Neural Kingdom," as bacteria and fungus don't have brains or neural activity. We are also undoubtedly a part of nature - I'm certainly not suggesting that we were simply placed here by divine creation as superior. Our evolution is a natural one, but our evolution has arrived at a species that is so far above the others it even gives us the ability to question and devalue that significance. It's not something that's only suggested by religion or Social Darwinism, but by biology.
Yes, we are in the same Kingdom as the great apes, and the same family of
hominidae. But that's where the distinction ends: our genus is
Homo, orangutans
Pongo, gorillas
Gorilla, and chimpanzees
Pan. Even within our own genus, we are more than
homo erectus or
homo neanderthalensis. We are undoubtedly evolved from them, but we are not them. We are
homo sapiens sapiens.
we seem to have lost working memory and hand-eye co-ordination:
Not really; ever watched an MLG game? There are people that can not only remember stark details like the chimp in the experiment, they can recall those memories decades later.
Birds see better than us,
And fish can naturally breath underwater. Does that make them overall superior to us?
but humans are so much more moderate and forgiving than nature, eh?
Yes. Humans - while we can be highly destructive - will go out of our way to preserve the weak and uplift the floundering. Nature is not so forgiving, and readily tramples the weak and failing into the dust.
'Birds from dinosaurs' being another stark example.
Birds from the suborder Theropoda, to be specific. And more precise than that, theropods from the clade Coelurosauria. Sauropods, for example, did not evolve into birds.