On humanity's portrayal in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time

I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time yesterday. The novel basically follows parallel storylines between humans embarked in a post-world's-end survival mission on a giant spaceship with whatever's left of humanity, and spiders in a wild planet getting genetically engineered for intelligence and sentience by a rogue virus. The spiders evolve fascinatingly across various generations,…