Does humanity exist to serve some ultimate, transcendent purpose? Conventional scientific wisdom gives the answer as a definitive no. This is the answer provided in this recent New York Times piece ‘The universe doesn’t care about your purpose’, for example, and also by physicist Lawrence Krauss in his latest book. According to Krauss, the fact that we evolved on this planet is just a “cosmic accident”, and people who believe otherwise are probably suffering from some kind of religious delusion.
I don’t think this view of life is necessarily correct, however, even though my worldview is entirely naturalistic and I usually do agree with conventional scientific wisdom. As I explain in this article I published recently in the journal Complexity, I know of one possible mechanism by which life could, in fact, be endowed with a natural purpose. To understand this mechanism, it’s necessary to understand how natural selection works.