On Darwin’s theory of evolution and the purpose of life

I know Darwin states that the fittest survive. And I know that he is credited for inventing the theory of evolution. Both of these remain true to this day. What I do not know is whether he states that the purpose of life is to survive. But whether or not he did, I’d like to comment on that.

It came to me, today, that of course the best survivors survive – I mean, they are the best at survival, so it seems reasonable that they would be the ones to survive things. But that’s probably not because they felt that they needed to. It’s probably much more random…

Imagine 3 races of mice. One that, upon encountering a cat, will start to chat with it, one that will run away from it, and one that will fight it. It might very well be that all of these mice existed at some point in evolution, but two of them would get eradicated pretty quickly. Cats are terrific mice eaters.

What I’m getting at here is that it quickly seems like the purpose of life is to survive. After all, the mice that ran are the ones that are still around. But there is no reason to put purpose behind it – the other mice were simply worse at cat-encountering than the running mice.

So when people say that the purpose of life is to survive, I believe they are wrong. We happen to still be around because we’re pretty good at surviving, but survival was never our purpose. That being said, we do have a lot of systems in our body and mind that happen to promote survival. The drive to reproduce, the drive to self-defend, the desire to do something meaningful in our society. All of these could be explained with ‘a purpose of survival’. And what is even more interesting is that our brain is also part of this. The brain also promotes survival – so maybe our purpose is survival?

No. It is no coincidence that a lot of these systems also help with survival. If they didn’t we wouldn’t have survived, and so we wouldn’t know. The purpose of our life can be anything, even non-survival. But if we want to continue making an impression on the world, we should probably keep on trying to survive.