Fundamental Survival

At one time I began to question the thinking behind the phrase “survival of the fittest” and I concluded that as the premise for a theory to describe the evolution of human behaviour that it didn’t fit the evidence that I saw and experienced. It seemed to me that what primarily influences what remains in the gene pool comes down to what survives to reproduce and that evolution is more influenced by what is eliminated than by the possible specialisations of a few ‘fittest’ specimens of any species. Turning the phrase around to “extinction of the least fit” gave a much more satisfactory account as to why humans behave mostly as they do. For a full account of my thinking on this you can read extinction-of-the-least-fit

By considering humans, as well as all other living creatures, as the end results of a legacy of survival occurring over hundreds of millions of years it becomes clear that most of what makes up the fabric of our being and of our nervous system is little more than the result of mechanisms that enhance survival. These survival mechanisms and systems became hard-wired into the final result – the human nervous system. These systems deal highly effectively (but still far from perfectly) with real world threats and assessments of the probable outcome of courses of action. These systems protect us and they mostly influence our motivation and momentary decision making. By considering ourselves as primarily organisms almost totally devoted to nothing more than surviving for as long as possible we can gain a much better insight into why we behave as we do and why we struggle to get things done as we would like.

The Problem of Conscious Awareness

The problem for humans is that we have evolved a conscious capacity that allows us to imagine and to think in advance and in detail about what we want. We can imagine possible outcomes (as well as impossible, i.e. fantastic, outcomes) and we can set these as desires. However, in setting these desires without proper care, attention or logic we often create deep conflict for the rest of the nervous system.

The nervous system monitors and acts upon real world conditions, momentary and short-term survival issues and the balance of risk and probabilistic likelihood versus reward for taking courses of action.

The higher consciousness often attempts to ignore and steamroller its way through these protective systems that evolved over the eons to maximise the chances of survival and to minimise the chances of extinction. This results in massive mental conflict.

Survival issues almost always take precedent and hence thwart the desires of the higher consciousness. The part of the nervous system devoted to primal survival cares little about how we feel as long as we have food, water, safety, shelter and our other primal needs well-provided for. For this reason we can spend years feeling negative, dissatisfied, even depressed and miserable so long as we keep up with the things that keep us surviving – that’s job number one and the human organism as a whole can easily accept the arrestment of our further development because it generally will not make a huge difference to our survival prospects. This is especially true when the risk and effort versus reward ratio is highly unfavourable.

Understanding this essential conflict and the reasons for it allows us to harness our survival mechanisms for our greater good. We struggle not because we are stupid, weak in character or unlucky. We struggle because we don’t understand that our poorly formed and often impossible to have desires go so strongly against our inner natures, born out of countless millennia of real world results that, on balance, give us a greater probability of surviving with relative ease.

This link will take you to part 3 of this series:fundamental emotion

This link will take you to the first part of the series:

Part 1: fundamental insights

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