What We Are: The Evolutionary Roots of Our Future [Hardcover]

Other animals are driven to spend essentially their whole lives just trying to get fed, stay alive, and get laid.  Thats about it.  The same was true for our proto-human ancestors. And modern humans of course also require a Survival Drive and a Sex Drive in order to leave descendants.  But today we spend most of our lives mainly just trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. 

In What We Are, Queens University biologist, Lonnie Aarssen, traces how our biocultural evolution has shaped Homo sapiens into the only creature that refuses to be what it is  the only creature preoccupied with a deeply ingrained, and absurd sentiment:  I have a distinct mental lifean inner selfthat exists separately and apart from material life, and so, unlike the latter, need not come to an end.  This delusion conceivably gave our distant ancestors some wishful thinking for finding some measure of relief from the terrifying, uniquely human knowledge of the eventual loss of corporeal survival.  But this came with an impulsive, nagging doubt  an obsessive underlying uncertainty: self-impermanence anxiety.  Biocultural evolution, however, was not finished.  It also gave us two additional, uniquely human, primal drives, both serving to help quell the burden of this anxiety.  Legacy Drive generates delusional cultural domains for extension of self; and Leisure Drive generates pleasurable cultural domains for distraction  escape  from self.  

Legacy Drive and Leisure Drive,  Aarssen argues, represent two of the most profound consequences of human cognitive and cultural evolution.  What We Are advances propositions regarding how a visceral susceptibility to self-impermanence anxiety has  paradoxically  played a pivotal role in rewarding the reproductive success of our ancestors, l#.