Beyond Survival of the Fittest

Wayfarer · August 22, 2026, 10:47pm

I’ve noticed an assumption that underwrites a good deal of discussion, and one which I intend to challenge. It is the assumption that Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection has shown that we are continuous with other natural species, so that the difference between ourselves and other animals is not a difference in kind, but only one of degree.

As a former Forum contributor once put it, we’re ‘apes on a rock.’ I’ve even noticed idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup casually say that ‘we’re apes’ in the context of asking the question, ‘why should we expect to have a faculty which provides insight into reality as it is?’

In taking issue with this, I am not defending any form of Biblically-inspired ‘intelligent design’. Nor do I take issue with the facts of evolutionary theory, which I’ve studied since childhood, and in which I continue to have great interest. Despite the recent discoveries complicating this account (such as the discoveries of new ancestral species including Denisovians and Homo Floresiensis), I think we have a pretty accurate grasp of the broad outlines of the evolution of our species.

Evolutionary science is one thing, “popular Darwinism” another. Michael Ruse has pointed out how readily evolutionary theory came to function as a secular worldview, supplying not merely an account of life’s origins but ideas about human progress and how we ought to live.¹ It is those philosophical implications that concern me here. ‘The ground-zero premise of evolutionary biology is that life is, in essence, a “survival enterprise”’ ¹. In seeking to understand the origin of species, that is a perfectly understandable criterion. But interpreting it as a maxim is something else.

It may be thought to go without saying that survival is a real good. After all, its opposite is death or extinction. But that is not the question I want to raise. The question I’m asking is is whether survival really is an end in itself.

The will to survive is indubitably a fundamental attribute of organic life — arguably the most primitive attribute. After all if the most primitive form of life had not possessed it, then there’d be no living things! So to question it appears to fall into nihilism. But what I’m driving at is something else; it is the (so far as we know) uniquely human ability to question our own existence, to ask ourselves why we exist. ‘To survive’ does not seem to me an adequate answer that question; after all, as we just saw, that can be said for any animal.

What appears to be distinctive is not cognition as such, but the capacity to make our own existence and purposes objects of explicit reflection. Aristotle said ‘Wisdom begins in wonder’. And while the Greek philosophers had divergent ideas as to the reasons behind existence, I don’t think it would have occured to any of them that there were none, nor to doubt that the task of philosophy was to discern them. Plato’s dialogues are animated by the conviction that there is a true good, and that it is incumbent on the philosopher to understand it. It is, as it were, the philosophers’ raison d’être.

This is part of what was challenged with the ascendancy of naturalism. ‘Never use the words higher and lower’ said Charles Darwin². Here, he was reacting against the traditional conception of hierarchy, the ancient mythos of the ‘great chain of being’. Science sought to free itself of such notions so as to restrict itself to the natural world and physical causation.

And while naturalists certainly feel a sense of awe before nature — indeed it is one of their main motivations — this doesn’t necessarily address the broader existential question, either. (After all, Richard Dawkins will appeal to the wonder of nature, but then in the next breath declare that humans are lumbering robots in the service of the Selfish Gene.)

And when asked if our cognitive faculties tell us the truth many will say that they must — so to provide us with a ‘survival advantage’. It is reasoned that the large brains of our hominid ancestors must have helped us navigate the hazards of life in such a way that we prevailed. So the answer to ‘why are we here’ ends up being: Because here we are!

But now we’ve arrived right back at where we started: that we’ve survived, and our intelligence serves that end. It can only mean more of what we have: more life, better conditions, technological progress — more of the same, in fact. Not that naturalism can’t envisage ends, but if those ends are in service of survival or adaptation, then again the question of purpose lurks.

I think this circularity is a consequence of something innate in naturalism. Which is that reason itself is understood in terms of successful adaptation. That it is, in other words, instrumentalised.

This is one of the themes in The Dialectics of the Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer (1944):

…In the ancient world the concept of ‘reason’ was objective and normative. Reason was thought to refer to a structure or order of what ought to be which was inherent in reality itself and which prescribed a certain way of life as objectively rational. Human beings were thought to have a faculty (nous, νοῦς) which enabled them to perceive and respond to this objective structure of the world; this faculty could then also be called reason in a derivative sense. Even when ancient philosophers spoke of reason as a human faculty (rather than as a structure of the world), their conception of it was ‘substantive’; humans were thought to be able to use reason to determine which goals or ends of human action were worthy of pursuit.

In the post-Enlightenment world the objective conception of reason becomes increasingly implausible. Reason comes to be conceived as essentially a subjective ability to find efficient means to arbitrarily given ends; that is, to whatever ends the agent in question happens to have. The very idea that there could be inherently rational ends is abandoned. Reason becomes subjective, formal and instrumental.

Likewise from Jürgen Habermas:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contended, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

So the naturalist answer to the question of ‘why we are here’ is in terms of the sequence of physical and temporal events that preceeded us. It understands well why organisms like us persisted. Consider Richard Dawkins again, who, in a televised debate with a Catholic Bishop, said in response to the question of whether science could address the reason for existence:

Why we exist, you’re playing with the word “why” there. Science is working on the problem of the antecedent factors that lead to our existence. Now, “why” in any further sense than that, why in the sense of purpose is, in my opinion, not a meaningful question. You cannot ask a question like “Why down mountains exist?” as though mountains have some kind of purpose. What you can say is what are the causal factors that lead to the existence of mountains and the same with life and the same with the universe. Now, science, over the centuries, has gradually pieced together answers to those questions: “why” in that sense.

Not that I expect a pat answer to the question of why we are here; I’m not suggesting a formula or a creed. It is more a matter of seeking a philosophy that makes sense of existence in the grand scheme, that sees life as more than a lottery or the outcome of chance. Thomas Nagel puts it like this:

The Platonic sense of the world is that its intelligibility and the development of beings to whom it is intelligible are nonaccidental; so our awareness and its expansion as part of the history of life and of our species are part of the natural evolution of the cosmos. Without a religious interpretation, this view does not face the problem of evil, or the problem of whether the whole process is aiming at any result. But it does expand our sense of what a human life is. It seems at least somewhat less plausible to say that all sense begins with the contingent desires and choices of the particular individual – that existence precedes essence, in the existentialist formula.

So to return to the question of what makes humans different from other species, I am saying that at least part of it is the ability to ask this question: who am I? What am I? Why am I here? in some way that a mountain, or a bat, cannot.

Meta_U · August 23, 2026, 12:24am

“Survival” in the context of Darwinian evolutionary theory is an ambiguous concept. We need to distinguish survival of the individual, from survival of the species. “Survival of the fittest” usually refers to survival of the species, which is a form of “survival” which is dependent on reproduction. However, when we speak of “the will to survive”, this usually refers to survival of the individual regardless of whether the individual reproduces

The two distinct senses of “survival” are not necessarily consistent with each other. The drive to reproduce often induces activities contrary to the will to survive. So we must be careful to separate these two senses, and deal with them according to their own distinct features.

Therefore when you introduce cognitive faculties, and the capacity to reason, and attempt to relate this to “survival”, we must make a separate relation for each of the two distinct senses of survival to allow for the difference between them.

Wayfarer · August 23, 2026, 1:34am

It’s not, actually. Some species have survived, many have not, others have evolved. And in day-to-day speech 'She survived the accident albeit with bad injuries; likewise is not ambiguous, the meaning is perfectly clear. Those examples you cite are all in conformity with evolutionary thinking generally. (Incidentally the term ‘survival of the fittest’ was actually coined by Herbert Spencer, but Darwin later adopted the saying as a synonym for natural selection.)

What I’m saying is that we have a tendency to attribute meanings to evolutionary theory that it may not actually warrant. So the ambiguity isn’t in the use of the term “survival” but the significance that is attributed to it. )

Joshs · August 23, 2026, 2:15am

Poor non-human animals. They get such a bad wrap. They had to put upon with centuries of being treated as though they can’t do this and they can’t do that. Humans have only recently given up the claim that animals have no feelings, don’t really feel pain, that they dont cognize, don’t mourn their dead, that they can’t use tools, have no form of language or handed down culture. One of the last remaining supposed crowning achievements the human race can lord over other species is that only we possess self-awareness.

Only we can ask “Who am I and why am I here”? Perhaps we should start with more basic questions, like ‘what makes me think there is an ‘I’ lurking beneath the society of processes that make up an embodied human or animal brain’? If the self is an effect of these processes, then maybe self-awareness is more an illusion than the huge human achievement we think it is.

Yes, humans have powerful memory capacity, which allows us to perform impressive feats of anticipatory sense-making, but we are far from the only animals who intend and anticipate. We just carry this father into the past and future than other animals, which I consider more a matter of degree than a difference in kind, and I expect that researchers in comparative animal behavior will eventually come to the same conclusion.

I do agree that mere survival misses what living creatures strive for, and that is the maintenance of a normative patten of functioning in their environment in the face of continually changing conditions. This means that to be alive is to be proactively adaptive, which is the basis of human ‘self-awareness’

But what we excel at is the opposite of what self-awareness implies if it is thought as a kind of inwardness. We are expert at inventing new selves along with new built niches , whereas other animals made much more festivities in their inventiveness.

Wayfarer · August 23, 2026, 2:40am

Right. And that is very much part and parcel of the mechanistic materialism which characterises the modern period. I remember I posted a thread on the previous forum about an appalling story wherein dogs were literally nailed to boards and dissected alive by medical students, convinced that their howls of pain were mere mechanical reflexes. When I posted it, I had believed that René Descartes himself had participated in such experiments but in the course of the discussion I learned that he had not (and actually had a pet dog for which he expressed affection). It occured sometime after his death, but the students involved were convinced that non-rational creatures such as dogs had no soul and feel no pain. And looking at the way animals are still treated in scientific testing, that is still quite a predominant sentiment. Animals as ‘genetic machines’ is still a very powerful metaphor in biological thinking. That’s part of what I’m protesting.

As for humans asking themself ‘what is this I that asks’, again, very much part of the human condition (or predicament, even.)

I don’t know if you read my Mind Cause or Consequence essay, but in it, I argue that intentionalilty and memory began with the formation of primeval organisms, that this is the origin of the sense of self (ipseity). But I also maintain a neo form of Aristotelian ontology - mineral, plant, animal, human - each with distinct horizons of possibility. Evolutionary naturalism tends to undercut the esteem in which the Greeks held reason and the horizons of possibility that it opens up. Again, reason is ‘explained’ in terms of the advantages it presents for survival, but there is no sense of reason in the cosmic sense implied by ‘logos’ in Greek philosophy (a term that later became appropriated by the Church, regrettably.)

The human does have ‘the burden of selfhood’, which comes with language, memory, ownership and the sense of mortality. I acknowledge that some animals have this too - elephants are a striking example. But I object to the attribution of any kind ‘saving grace’ to our biological origins and the popular idea that a sense of oneness with nature as a source of solace. Heaven knows our forbears were ‘at one with nature’ for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet those millenia were also filled with dreadful suffering, pain and conflict. Nothing like the ‘noble savagery’ of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which I’m sure was a projection. Another passage from Horkheimer might be relevant:

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. ~ The Eclipse of Reason

noAxioms · August 23, 2026, 3:16am

Not even that. Every species goes extinct after a while. All of our ancestor species are extinct. So life is about what you leave behind.

So perhaps not. The end is more ‘what you leave behind’. Humans are poorly evolved and will likely not survive anywhere near as long as some highly evolved (perfected) species like say the horseshoe crab, which have been around like forever. But humans have a great potential to leave something new behind, despite the destruction it causes. Think of the cyanobacteria which single handedly caused this major extinction event very similar to the Holocene extinction event. But something great came of it. Be a shame if the Holocene was wasted.

Humans have a capacity to ponder this, but they spectacularly lack the capacity to realize any species-wide goal, even something as primitive as say preservation of the species. As individuals we can be selfish, and as groups (tribes) we can gain advantage over other groups, but we seem never to act for the benefit of the whole. An alien invasion might unite humanity. I don’t think anything else can since there’s more to be gained by betraying the species to gain advantage to smaller groups.

As an example, take global warming. Lots of talk and articles about it, but no solutions. The people with actual solutions are ignored to the point of most not even knowing about them. Certainly those in power take no interest in such actions.

As for humans being special in any way, perhaps one should ask the opinion of non-humans, similar to how I need to read international news sources to get a clearer picture of what goes on in the USA since almost all domestic news these days is heavily tainted by propaganda. So ask say the whales what they think of humans. They have language. We’re like the black plague: an epidemic, an upset to balance. Most rational species would likely be relieved if we were to disappear. So one goal of humanity should be to fit in, to not be the epidemic. Not going to happen of course. We’ve a long way to evolve before we can do that.

Jamal · August 23, 2026, 3:23am

Interesting OP

(I ask that you please read all of this post before replying)

This doesn’t establish a difference in kind. The capacity to ask ourselves why we exist might be the result of continuous change, because on/off—either you have it or you don’t—phenomena can result from continuous gradation, not from any underlying on/off constitution. No categorical difference required.

And the phrase “cognition as such” is contrasted with something so narrow as to guarantee the conclusion: the capacity to make our own existence and purposes objects of explicit reflection. Granted that this is unique, but what does that have to do with (natural?) kinds?

Other species have unique traits. If uniqueness were sufficient for a difference in kind, then every species would differ in kind from every other.

The problem here, I think, is that asking whether humans differ from other animals in kind or in degree is a bad question, or at least an insufficiently clear one.

Classification is plural. There are many ways of doing it. A taxonomy of life might follow phylogenetic descent, or phenetics, or functional-ecological features. There is no standpoint over and above them, so there is no fixed arrangement of kinds. It depends what you’re interested in.

And if you are, as a human being with the capacity to ask why you exist, so enamoured by this capacity that you would like it to govern your taxonomy of life, you will say that human beings are different in kind.

I’m not denigrating this. If we think an existential or phenomenological approach to the human being is the best one—as opposed to reducing people to nothing but naked apes etc.—we may well want to emphasize this capacity for self-reflective thought.

The problem I have is in taking the question at face value and pretending that there is a single final answer. What remains to be shown is that, and in which contexts, the existential/phenomenological/otherwise humanist approach is the best one, and why.

Scorpion · August 23, 2026, 3:47am

You should read about Alex the parrot (1976 - 2007). According to his researcher Alex is the only case of an animal asking an existential question. One day Alex looked at himself in the mirror and asked, “what color?” Unfortunately we don’t have either audio or video evidence of this spectacular event. Perhaps it means nothing because Alex never followed that up with more questions that would indicate he was contemplating at a level never seen in animals before. At best it was only a fleeting moment of insight, a seed that failed to germinate. Alex died suddenly at the age of 31. I believe researchers had chosen his species for the study because they had long lifespans.

ages · August 23, 2026, 4:14am

Well, what is there after surviving? Is there some ‘other end’?

Some people seem to forget, or never came to know, that things like planets, stars, galaxies, and even the Universe, Itself, are all alive and thus living things themselves.

Life did not just start at some point or at some time on earth. Life has been existing for as long as Existence, Itself, has been around, which is for eternity, by the way.

Human beings are obviously just ‘another animal’ living on earth. However, what separates human beings from all other animals is that human beings can learn, understand, and reason about anything and everything. No other animal has this ability.

Now, you asked, ‘Why do human beings exist?’ The purpose of human beings is to learn and teach.

Imagination is where every human being created thing began, or was born. Therefore, imagination is where the Creator exists.

People seem to have forgotten, or just never previously knew, the Real True “philosophers” in Life are the newborn human beings. They are the ones who are Truly open, and who live in True wonderment about ‘where they are now’. All young human beings are Truly open to learn any and every thing, and are Truly inquisitive in Life. They are ‘the ones’ who are always wanting to explore, and discover and learn more all the time. Sadly and very unfortunately, though, ‘this pure inquisitiveness and curiosity’ gets “drummed” out of them, by adults who had not yet learned the answers, and so would tell children to “Stop asking why”, or “Shut up and stop asking questions”. Uncovering, knowing, and understanding the ‘true good’, by the way, has already been achieved.

Frank · August 23, 2026, 4:42am

There’s a book I think you might like. It’s by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it’s called the Scarlet Letter. Get a copy that has an introduction that explains the symbolism in the story.

It depicts a war between rationality and irrationality, where the real victim is the spirit of the community, symbolized by a preacher (whose job is to explain why we’re here.)

I think this is similar to the narrative that interests you, except maybe you’re leaving out the attack on irrationality, which is very much allied with nature.

Thrifclyfe · August 23, 2026, 7:55am

The image of the human has been somewhat minimized in the modern age because, I assume, we’re afraid of being egotistical. If we think too much of ourselves, the wisdom surely goes, we’ll start more wars and defeat more bees. This is quite the tragedy because some people are affected by the relatively puny nature of human existence and the last thing they need is the be reminded of their teleological ineffectiveness.

Joshs · August 23, 2026, 2:30pm

I think the relevant question is not whether humans are one with nature, but what is the nature of nature. Is nature a fixed norm, a static homeostasis, or is the nature of nature to continually overcome itself? Nietzsche wrote:

Darwin absurdly overestimates the influence of ‘external circumstances’; the essential thing about the life process is precisely the tremendous force which shapes, creates form from within, which utilizes and exploits ‘external circumstances’ … -that the new forms created from within are not shaped with a purpose in view, but that in the struggle of the parts, it won’t be long before a new form begins to relate to a partial usefulness, and then develops more and more completely according to how it is used.” “Everything that lives is exactly what shows most clearly that it does everything possible not to preserve itself but to become more …” (Last Notebooks)

If the nature of life is to overcome itself with no overarching purpose in mind, then perhaps reason is the handmaiden of irrational or a-rational forces.

Elephant · August 23, 2026, 3:27pm

I think this is what you’re really asking below, so I’ll say what I think.

I think when we confuse the concept of survival (the act of surviving itself) with the point of why we are here, all we’re doing is committing a fallacious argument. The point of carpentry tools is not to accumulate more and more tools to use more and more tools for the sake of using those tools; the point is to build a house to live in. And from this point, we can use our imagination for why we want to have a house: safety, health, comfort, gathering, etc. Notice how the tools are now twice-removed from our goal.

Really, I think if there’s one way to kill ourselves faster and sooner, it’s the overthink, otherwise known as decision paralysis. (I’m not being sarcastic here because we have real life examples of overthink that had led to more deaths: the 1918 Influenza outbreak that killed ~ 50M people worldwide. Or recently, the Covid-19 pandemic).

Survival is the tool we use so that we can discover and experience the vast and long universe because there are a million reasons for why. Exploring what the universe can tell us is a worthwhile endeavour. Likewise, the happiness and love we feel among our family and friends is sufficient to want to survive. If our entire ‘universe’ is just our house and the backyard, that’s not so bad either.

Chelydra · August 23, 2026, 4:06pm

My interpretation of evolution is that the environment selects phenotypes but transmits genotypes. The genotype is heritable. The phenotype — what the environment directly encounters — is not directly heritable. What passes forward is the internal configuration, not the external expression. The genotype bounds what phenotypes are possible; environmental selection operates within that space. The internal bounding and external filtering are real. But which is primary depends on which you think explains the forms that appear.

The form-creating force in Nietzsche’s sense is exactly the capacity to revise that model through contact with actual constraints — not just to receive the world but to organize it according to an internal evaluative structure that is itself developing. And this is exactly what the questions are doing.

What is going on now involving me? Why am I doing this? Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?

The naturalist answers covering those questions are evidence that it fits my form — and Nietzsche is more than welcome to insist I don’t forget.

Wayfarer · August 23, 2026, 10:33pm

I think your criticism rests on an ambiguity in my use of “difference in kind.” If by that I meant a biological or taxonomic distinction, then I agree: humans are primates, and our evolutionary descent is continuous with that of other organisms. But that isn’t what I’m saying.

What I’m suggesting is an ontological and explanatory distinction. Evolutionary continuity does not entail that everything which emerges in the course of evolution must be continuous in the sense of being explicable in the same terms. It’s that tendency which I’m criticizing — it’s reductionist. A continuous evolutionary process can produce genuinely novel forms of organisation and capacity, in the form of new species and genera.

Nor am I assuming that such novelty must have appeared through some instantaneous evolutionary “switch”. But the archaeological record does raise questions about the apparently relatively abrupt emergence of symbolic behaviour, language and abstract thought. The emergence of cave art, complex symbolism, etc. is hardly an obvious picture of simple continuous gradation. Chomsky and Berwick’s Why Only Us? is relevant here, particularly their argument concerning the distinctive and apparently relatively recent emergence of the human language faculty.

But the deeper point I’m trying to make isn’t even primarily about when these capacities emerged. It is about what they enable once they have emerged. A human being remains a biological organism, but is no longer adequately described solely in biological terms. We can act for reasons, reflect upon our purposes, question our beliefs, formulate abstract concepts, and ask what kind of beings we are and why we exist. In other words, we have a different horizon of being. I think that is the origin of the ancient myths of dualism, of the idea of an immaterial spirit trapped in or harnessed to an animal body. Surely we don’t think like that any more, but in forgetting those myths also might have lost sight of an element of truth they convey.

So I wouldn’t claim that humans constitute a separate biological “kind” from other animals. My question is whether biological continuity entails ontological or explanatory continuity. I don’t think it does. And that is what I mean by saying that we are no longer determined solely in biological terms.

In fact, I think your final point gets very close to the question I’m interested in: what makes the existential or phenomenological account of the human being more than just one optional taxonomy among others? My suggestion is that the answer may lie precisely in the fact that the human being can make its own existence, purposes and modes of knowing objects of reflection. That’s the question I’m trying to explore, rather than claiming that I’ve already settled it.

Wayfarer · August 23, 2026, 10:34pm

I’ve read about Alex. Have a look at the sad story of Nim Chimpsky

Thanks - I’ll get back to you if I read it.

Wayfarer · August 23, 2026, 10:56pm

thanks and welcome to the conversation! Sadly, however, I’m going to challenge the premisses of your comment.

To start with, as you probably know, climate scientists have suggested that our epoch could be called the ‘anthropocene’, because of the vast changes that human energy production have wrought on the environment. Some on the radical fringes of the green movement see humanity as a curse on the natural environment, responsible for mass extinctions and the destruction of vast swathes of natural habitat. So I don’t see how the human presence can be ‘minimized’ in light of that.

As regards egotism - the strange irony is that ‘scientism’ – here I’m referring to the kind of evangalising naturalism of the likes of Richard Dawkins - is strangely anthropocentric, although of course that would be bitterly denied. But it is anthropocentric because science proceeds on the basis of what humans deem to be fundamental according to current science, which in mainstream terms is largely concevied in terms of physical causation, that being the kind of causation that science is best equipped to observe and measure. Meanwhile we’re assured that evolution has unfolded with no regard to what is higher or lower, better or worse, but simply what survives, and what doesn’t.

Big ‘if’! In naturalism what kind of over-arching purpose could there be other than continuing to exist in ever new forms? I think we see in transhumanism and Elon Musk’s vision of space colonization a kind of boundless self-aggrandizement.

Pretty much what I said!

The ‘evo-devo’ movement in evolutionary biology is increasingly calling that into question. Have a look at Evolution “On Purpose” - an MIT open-source book on same.

Dawnstorm · August 23, 2026, 11:54pm

To me, the ground-zero premise of evolutionary biology is that you’re different from your parents. Survival is part of the sorting mechanism; that is all. Individuals sruvive all their life long and when they don’t they die: they fail to survive exactly once, and that’s the same for all. Some have children, and some don’t. I’m in my fifties now, and I don’t have children. I, as in my genome, won’t “survive” my own death. Gone, goner, gonest. Evolutionary dead end, me. Does it matter. Maybe. Not to me, though. Does it matter to evolution? No. First of all, because nothing matters to evolution since it’s not the type of entity that can care to begin with. Second because this sort of sub-species micro extinction event is part of evolution. It’s an outcome on par with any other. Evolution, personified, just keeps track, and once the last living thing is gone, closes the book and walks away. (How’s that for a conceit?)

So once we figure out we’re different from our parents, we have to figure out how different we are from our ancestors… all the way back. And when do we stop being the same species. What is a species to begin with? Scientists need a system: cladistics is common these days; morphological classifaction was popular; the ability to interbreed maybe? For a person like me, it’s all gut feeling, tempered by knowledge (sexual dimorphism can ruin your intuition - that tiny spider and that huge spider, they’re the same species? Really?)

Whatever else is the case, I am a human. That’s a baseline that’s hard to deny. It’s at the very core of the entire classification process. It’s supposed to profit us, so it’s about us. And I think that’s the exact difference between humans and the all the other animals: I’m one of us and not one of them.

And that’s precisely why I’m skeptical of humans attempting to pronounce humans special. Prime primate behaviour that. The us-and-them game. We’re not going to pronounce tape-worms special, are we? Personally, I’m fond of armadillos, but I may change my mind once I get to know them enough.

What’s the key difference between humans and other animals. We, the lot of us who read this (and I can almost hear the odd lemur cackle), are part of that group, and the rest of them - they’re all not. The rest is mostly (though maybe not all) chest-thumping and back patting. That sort of humanism grows on the same tree as racism, sexism, and whatever groupism we have. To a certain degree favouring your in-group is somewhere between necessary and understandable - if we don’t take care of our offspring, they die. So do baby a lot of baby turtles as they crawl into the sea after hatching, but a lot more survive than would abandon human babies. I’m the sort of person, though, who dislikes playing the humans-r-us game. So beyond the survival of the fittest is still change: you’re not a copy of your parents. That is and will be the heart of evolution until the final extinction event. After that nobody will be around to care one way or another. For me, that’s it.

We’re humans, we’re primates, we’re animals, we’re living things, we’re mass. That’s just an abstraction game. We have kids (well, I don’t), and our kids will have kids, and in enough generations our kid’s kid’s kid’s kid’s… kid’s may or may not still be human, but they’ll still be are kid(n)'s kid’s. And that’s evolution.

Chelydra · August 24, 2026, 12:09am

My comment was written with the intention of acknowledging that work in the theory of evolution has long had ways to account for what Nietzsche is talking about: that biological processes are responsible for the direction and rate of evolution, and that life itself has ways to alter its own heredity, without going into the details of current knowledge in the field of evolutionary theory. Maybe I did that in not so clear a way, trying to establish a structural point… On first look, I don’t see anything controversial in that book, familiar stuff… Thank you for the link; I am very interested to read the conclusions and interpretations…

Scorpion · August 24, 2026, 12:10am

I can relate, being a smoker myself. Not the same with Alex - he’s a parrot and apart from bipedality and the gift of speech nothing much in common between us and him. Of course the mad Socrates did pluck a chicken and say, “here is a man!”

Evolution is not teleological. If one day bowing to a rock gives you a survival advantage, you and everyone will and the trait will jump to the next gen. Imagine a world of bobbin’ heads.