Abstract
Darwinism presents a paradox. It discredits the notion that
one’s life has any intrinsic meaning, yet it predicts that we
are designed by Darwinian natural selection to generally insist
that it must—and so necessarily designed to misunderstand
and doubt Darwinism. The implications of this paradox are
explored here, including the question of where then does the
Darwinist find meaning in life? The main source, it is proposed,
is from cognitive domains for meaning inherited from
sentient ancestors—domains that reveal our evolved human
nature as the fool that it is: given to distractions and delusions
of many kinds, designed by natural selection primarily for one
essential purpose—to allay our instinctual fear of failed legacy,
rooted in our uniquely human awareness that we are not immortal.
Darwinism, however, also teaches that genuine legacy
is a fate enjoyed only by individual genes. Accordingly, as
argued here, those genes with the grandest legacy—and hence
rampant within us—are of two types: “legacy-drive” genes delude
us into thinking that the legacy can be individually and
personally ours; and “leisure-drive” genes distract us from
the agonizing truth that it can never be. The most rudimental
delusion of legacy is the perception of offspring as vehicles
for memetic legacy—the transmission of resident memes
from one’s mind to the minds and behaviors of offspring—
thus also ensuring genetic legacy: the transmission of resident
genes, including importantly, genes inherited from ancestors
that influence both legacy and leisure drives. Today, legacyand
leisure-drive genes reveal their phenotypes across a wide
range of human affairs, and together with the phenotypes of
survival- and sex-drive genes, they provide a foundation for a
novel view of the Darwinian roots of cultural evolution.