People are eternal souls.

"Darwinism altered the study of man. Before Darwinism, people were considered to be a creation of God, but the theory of evolution situated the study of man within the social sciences, taking God out of the equation. In the process, social scientists started replacing the notion of virtues and vices with more “neutral” descriptors of human characteristics. Virtue itself gave way to “pro-social behavior,” while vices like impatience and gluttony changed to “low frustration tolerance” and “the idea that obesity is genetically predetermined instead of under personal self-control.”

"An interesting example from the Netherlands comes from the shift in language to enumerate the number of people living in Dutch villages and cities; in the mid-19th century, we counted “souls,” but at some point, this changed to “inhabitants.”"

Elze van Hamelen, in her review of the book One Idea to Rule Them All by Michelle Stiles