Doesn’t Life Want to Live?

Do you ever think about what life was like for early humans once we had our basic needs met? You know, once we figured out how to procure victuals and maintain a shelter. What was life like? 

Experts including historians, anthropologists, and scientists seem to disagree. Some say we were ignorant savages (I’m looking at you, director of Pocahontas) whereas others claim we actually didn’t work that much but spent a lot of time playing. 

I like to think we were pretty smart. I think we fairly quickly met our basic needs and spent a lot of time enjoying ourselves. Painting caves. Making babies (though we may not have known that’s what we were doing). Learning to communicate, tell stories, and document history.

It’s certainly fun to think about. And I can’t help but think what I wrote in the title above:

Life wants to live. 

Doesn’t it?

And, evolutionarily, wouldn’t natural selection sort it out this way? As in, individuals who had a proclivity or interest in life — living life — would be more likely to procreate and perpetuate their genes into the future. 

I’m making a few assumptions here. Mostly that Nature Knows Best and that the Meaning of Life is to express our individual genome. In essence, to live out our nature. Refer to those episodes for more details.

I think we humans are at a point in our evolution where we are sorting out the recent past. The past 5,000 years or so of recorded history are all we know about ourselves, and that is a tiny fraction of the time we have existed. 

Our ancestors have been around maybe 200–300,000 years. What was going on before, say, Egypt?

Many think our ‘highly evolved brains’ make us ‘better’ than our ancestors. Certainly our non-human ancestors. Modern times have been dominated by decisions and choices that utilize our ‘advanced brains’. This is unique.

During most of our history natural selection was mostly external. As our brains became more complex (and more complicated) humans started to impose selection pressures on ourselves. That’s where things get interesting.

As I mark 150 episodes and over three years of this podcast, I am being pulled in this direction. Along with many other thinkers and creators, I feel a collective emergence of questions. Many people are questioning our human decisions. We are wondering about the direction of evolution. We might be creating more problems than we are doing good. Our capacity to override Nature might be taking us away from where we need to be.

We are in an age where we, and our technology, can act as new selection pressures and literally alter the course of evolution.

Is this good? I argue it is not. 

This episode introduces many ideas that I will explore in the next arc of Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom. I hope you enjoy the summary and will stick around for the future. 

Streaming podcast audio: 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/13928376

YouTube video: 

https://youtu.be/wePW9VFHtBg