Phylogentic Trees

At the beginning of the semester, my teacher stressed the importance of the flippability of the phylogenetic tree. (For all of you who have not taken Biology from my professor, a phylogenetic tree is what scientists use to record evolution.)

For example, a phylogenetic tree can be written as either:
or or
This is important to note because, get a load of this, "Humans are no more evolutionarily advanced than any other organism."

Well, the real reason we studied them in the order that we did (The first one) is that every time we moved to the next organism we would add another characteristic: Sponges have nothing, not even tissues, jellyfish have tissues but nothing else, worms had tissues, a coelom and segmentation, bugs had tissues, segmentation, a true coelom and sensory organs, blah blah blah. Eventually we got to humans with tissues, bilateral symmetry, segmentation, differentiation, a coelom, sensory organs, cephalization, a backbone, a placenta, a spine that absorbs impact, a cerebrum (not to mention an entire nervous system including notochord, dorsal spinal column, and nerve endings which each took billions of years to evolve supposedly), arms that can ROTATE!!!, and the capacity to cook ramen noodles, to mention about 1%.

Everything that was added after every billion years or so we have in spades. So what on earth does he mean when he says we're not more evolutionarilly advanced than sponges? I've a phylogenetic chart a mile long!