From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life

How the meaningless process of natural selection produces purposeful beings who find meaning in the world.

In From Darwin to Derrida, evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpose, gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. The key to this, Haig proposes, is the origin of mutable “texts”—genes—that preserve a record of what has worked in t...