The Pursuit of Unhappiness

Abstract

Abstract For most of the living world, the good life is mainly a matter of context. Given the right setting and a good dose of luck, most organisms tend to do well, or at least to succeed in their terms: that’s basically how they’re wired. Conversely, put a typical creature in the wrong setting and—good luck or no—it is lost, pretty much guaranteed a quick death. For perhaps the majority of life forms, almost every place on earth is “the wrong setting” (a fact that gives zookeepers no end of headaches). Not so, it seems, for Homo sapiens, a species so adaptable that its members can flourish just about anywhere, probably including space. This is not because they are hard to kill, like cockroaches and rats, but because they are smart. Though rather needy in purely physical terms, these tropical primates have a remarkable talent for engineering whatever environment they find themselves in to suit their purposes. They are “ecological engineers,” to use Kim Sterelny’s apt expression. Impressed by their seemingly boundless ingenuity, many of them, at least in the brief era leading up to the twenty-first century, have thought that their species largely transcends context. For its members really need

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