How evolutionary biology makes everyone an existentialist | Aeon Essays
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Ethics cannot be based on human nature because, as evolutionary biology tells us, there is no such thing
Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put in the world to rise above. Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in African Queen (1951) Questions about what matters, and why, and what exists in the world, are quintessentially philosophical. The answers to many of these questions are informed by how we conceive of ourselves. How has what is often described as the ‘Copernican revolution’ effected by Charles Darwin changed our self-conception? One particularly surprising feature of evolutionary biology is that it lends significant support to existentialism. To make the journey from evolutionary…
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