Books, Inq. — The Epilogue

What is labor? We cannot be satisfied with the inadequate description stating that labor is the mode of being "at" the world in which men transform nature as it is given in order to take from it what he needs to provide for his physical being. Man does not merely labor to live, to remain alive by eating and drinking. Strictly speaking, not even of eating and drinking may we say that we do these actions exclusively in order to live. What man wants is to live, and eating and drinking themselves are modes of living.

- William A. Luijpen, Existentional Phenomenology

This, it seems to me, points up the flaw at the heart of evolutionary psychology. By undertaking to explain all human activity as modes of survival it turns a means into an end and completely misses the true end. We do not live in order to survive. Those of us who do not live at a subsistence level do not even think usually in terms of survival. We are not misers of life. We do not hoard our vital powers. Instead, we spend our lives doing things, even things that put our lives our risk. Moreover, we humans are only too aware that we cannot - and do not - survive indefinitely.