Is absolute uniqueness supposed to be necessarily miraculous? In any case, those aren't my words. I'd speak of personhood emerging from animality by the supervenience of higher-level psychological and social properties on naturally selected ones.

Indeed, religions often emphasize our uniqueness by positing a divine inner spark or spirit or theological purpose. But those were only prescientific explanations of real data. The data include the history of civilization's domination of the land, sea, and air. There are theistic and secular, naturalistic (scientific and philosophical) explanations of the historical facts. I endorse the latter.

It doesn't logically follow that because religious explanations are preposterous, there are no data here that need to be explained.