It has long been held by spiritual peoples that human kind was somehow special - apart from the rest of the kingdom of animalia, and possessed of some higher purpose.
From the perspective of modern science this idea can be easily dismissed as a simple byproduct of ego. We are self-aware and thus, unavoidably, we are self-absorbed. This reduces many of the endevours by which we define our humanity - and our specialness - to a mere curiosity: a byproduct of a byproduct of a cold survival-driven evolutionary step.
The question of why we seek the meaning of life is as much a question of what makes us human as it is about subsequent purpose.
If it is, ironically, our ability to question our humanity which makes us human, then we must, by our own definition, follow through with the next logical question, which again starts with 'why?'. WHY are we capable of such creative thought? After all, what use has Nature for Meaning or Destiny? What use has Nature for such an animal as 'Philosopher'?
What use, indeed. Like the ancients before us we observe how each animal, plant etc serves to maintain a delicate kind of balance through it's own existance: by taking it's place in the food chain, by providing or helping to shape the habitat of others, by simply living and dying as the particular life form they each take. Also aknowledged, first in the stories of ancient traditional peoples and more recently by science, is the way in which each organism evolves and adapts to a form 'perfected' or 'most wisely suited' to it's relative environment and conditions.
Modern humans emerged from this same process around 200,000 years ago, but the changes didnt stop there. As with all of it's creations, nature continues to tweek the human code as necessary. In fact, on a few occassions since the emergence of modern humans, nature has gone into overdrive - rapidly evolving the human brain, for instance, through some very intense sessions of natural selection. Two such occassions centered on the genes microcephalin and ASPM, both associated with the regulation of brain-size. For each gene, one class of variants has arisen recently and has been spreading rapidly because it is favored by selection. For microcephalin, the new variant class emerged about 37,000 years ago and now shows up in about 70 percent of present-day humans. For ASPM, the new variant class arose about 5,800 years ago and now shows up in approximately 30 percent of today's humans. [1] The key here, in the context of our discussion, is that the microcephalin variant appears along with the emergence of such traits as art and music, religious practices, and sophisticated tool-making techniques - which date back to about 50,000 years ago, and the ASPM variant coincides with the oldest known civilization, Mesopotamia, which dates back to 7000 BC. [1]
As we know these things are pretty much explainable as having been the result of new-found spare time. Does this mean that human purpose really is just an ego trip? Or could it be that nature got us to this point for a reason. So that we could fulfill some purpose? Why did no other species develope the large neocortex which allows us to do our deep thinking?
Do you believe in a higher collective purpose for humanty? What do you beleive that purpose might be? Do you beleive humanity will fulfill that purpose? Is there time to fulfill it?
P.S: It's worth noting that this same steady increase in brain size which made us who we are today will, if continued, eventually have the opposite effect - slowing down the brain functions and seriously dumbing us down.
