Description
Aarssen L (2015) What Are We? Exploring the Evolutionary Roots of our Future. Queen's University, Kingston. ebook 233 pages.
Humans are fascinated with themselves. What are we? Do our lives mean
something? Our obsession with these questions is why the arts and humanities
exist. And yet, their long history of success is built on a celebrated pluralism of
interpretation for the human experience. Ironically, the ‘What are we?’ question
is required here to remain essentially unanswered — an enduring and revered
mystery.
But evolutionary biology has, with wide consensus in recent decades, given us a
very clear and certain perspective of what we are: We are an animal among
many millions of others, the vast majority of which have long been extinct — a
species that is only about 300,000 years old, but descended from a long lineage,
most of which was not human. These discoveries have given us what the arts and
humanities never could, and never aspired to find: vital insights into how and
why human nature, social life, and culture have come to be what they are, and so
uniquely different from other species.
This book is a survey of these insights from Darwinism — insights that have never
been met with enthusiasm from the general public, nor from many professionals.
But a deeper, more concise, and more broadly public understanding of our
evolutionary roots has never been more urgent. We are now faced with the
daunting task of surviving the impending collapse of modern civilization, and the
challenges of designing a new, more sustainable and more humanistic model for
our descendants. And our greatest limitation may be that we don’t really know
ourselves very well at all.
CHAPTER TITLES:
1. What Have We Done?
2. A Primer on Evolutionary Roots
3. Becoming Human
4. Discovery Of Self
5. The March Of Progress
6. Whispering Genes
7. The Mating Machine
8. Staying Alive
9. Escape From Self
10. Extension of Self
11. The Big Four Human Drives
12. Becoming The Solution