We're also the only species dumb enough to have truly organized war, and also war for the wrong reasons. Ants fight one another in a way not totally alien to ours, and even practice a form of slavery in some species, but the critical difference is this. Ant colonies fight, ultimately, simply for resources and survival; even enslavement is purely pragmatic to make their nest function more easily and increase their species' reproductive success. Humans, on the other hand, very rarely fight to actually defend themselves. The recorded millennia of human history are littered with examples of wars fought over (or at least justified by) religion and other ideologies. We get into absolute screaming matches and kill each other by the thousands over our differing answers to questions that an octopus, despite its fairly massive brain(s), would never even have bothered to ask.
And that's the problem, really. Humans aren't "smarter" than some species of animals with equivalent amounts of brain matter; our minds are just more highly complicated. Structurally, it's very clear that humans are still firmly rooted in the animal domain. The back-lower parts of our nervous (brain stem, limbic system, spinal column and so on) are the "oldest" in terms of evolution, and also the fastest to act by far. Your reflexes, for example trigger due to communication between muscle and spine, without any input from your brain whatsoever. Our upper brain function has a longer activation time but is closer to what we'd call "thinking" (remembering a string of numbers, recognizing someone's face, rehearsing a speech in your mind, whatever).
This puts humanity in an extremely strange place as far as evolution is concerned. Our society developed to its current stage over a long period of time, as far as we're concerned. To evolution's perspective, however, the time in question was the blink of an eye or less. As such, the human species is a lot like a single person during the teenage years, growing exponentially stronger but stumbling over the sudden power of our own faculties.
For example, say you have to present a speech in front of your class. There are certain people who are fine with this, mind you, but for most of us this represents a source of some nervousness. When the appointed time comes to make your speech, you present physical symptoms; your heart rate rises, your palms may sweat, your pupils dilate. For some people, the knees and legs may quiver despite your most stringent attempts to calm yourself.
Why? The fear related to your speech is purely social in origin; realistically, nothing physically bad will happen to you no matter the result. Your upper brain fears ridicule or ostracization, certainly, but that's the problem. The lower parts of your brain aren't sufficiently developed to grasp the complex nature of a social situation, and are only receiving input that something is wrong, and respond in the only way they're evolved to. Your pupils are trying to let in the most light possible to gather more information, and the shaking in your knees is preparedness to leap quickly backwards. Those two things saved one of your distant ancestors from a poisonous snake, but in the physically safe setting they become annoyances.
So, humans have a bizarre disjuncture between what our survival instincts are prepared for and the actual complicated requirements of social existence. So?
It bears keeping in mind that, indeed, part of our brain is still convinced that we're earlier primates living in a jungle somewhere, seeking mates and avoiding Sudden Onset Panther-Mediated Death Syndrome. For one thing, that's just humbling to remember, and humility can be good for keeping touch with reality. For another, being aware of the physical parts of your reaction to stimuli can lead to awareness of what your immediate reactions are, so that you can be more in control and mount a response rather than a simple reaction.
It's also important to remember that, no matter how badly your day is going or how stupid you feel, you genuinely are one of the most complicated and intelligent life forms in existence as far as we're aware. Regardless of your beliefs about the intelligence of the universe and that whole situation, you're the result of 2.1 billion years of evolutionary experimentation (conservatively; that's when we think cells with a nucleus appeared, to say nothing of the first time life originated here). I'm not trying to swell anybody's ego here, but each individual human possesses a sort of consciousness unlike any other on the planet. There are well over seven billion of us now, and out of all of us there is only one you. You're unique and special... just like everyone else.
A quote comes to mind, originally by Edward Everett Hale: "I am only one, but I am still one."
TL;DR Brains are spooky. Evolution-science; you are only one person but fully one person, with all the privileges and responsibility that implies.
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