Oriphiel

How can I pick a side? We exist to reproduce, and it is what out species has developed around. It's very easy to argue that all life exists to replicate. However, most humans aren't thinking about the imperative when they do the things they do, they just follow their urges, and our complex psyches have overridden many of those primal urges while leaving other outdated urges completely intact. And yet we do have the ability to think about the imperative while we go through our days, examining the world around us and finding that we're able to change our patterns of behavior, and our social needs can actually come before our own lives. Why should I pick just one of these to support, ignoring the others, when they're all true?

Apart of us is still driven towards the imperative subconsciously, and yet certain factors also drive us away from it. We're in a transitional stage, where part of us is still simple and instinctual, while the other is intellectual and complex.

Think about it like this; there's a car nut who owns a vintage hot-rod, and every year they upgrade it in some way. After a few years, half of the parts are fresh and new, while the other half are still old and well-worn, and there are even a few parts that the car still has but no longer needs. Humans are the same way; we have developed and evolved to a point where many of our old instincts are no longer needed in the modern environment, yet they remain. There are also a bunch of new parts that look fancy, but we have no clue what they do, and we can't make use of them yet (like a turbo charger that has been partially installed, but not completely hooked up). We're a jumble. You're asking me to decide whether the hot-rod is either an old car (always subconsciously moving towards the imperative) or a new car (free from being driven towards the imperative), when the truth is that it's both. Other animals are similar to humans in that almost every species never stops evolving and each has weird transitional hiccups and traits, but our very high levels of intelligence and our ability to actively change our behavioral patterns complicate the matter in a way that other species have yet to have to deal with.