The quote in the last post was taken from The Third Chimpanzee, a book Jared Diamond wrote before Guns, Germs, and Steel. If I find fault with his characterization of natural selection it is only as an example; it's a practice shared by many other scientists.

At the end of chapter four of The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond writes: "The goal of all human activity can't be reduced to the leaving of descendants. Once human culture was firmly in place, it acquired new goals."

Indeed we have, and there can be few examples of those goals more powerful than our art, commerce, religion, and our indulgence of excess (say in food and entertainment).

Yet Diamond rightly points out at the end of that chapter that "we evolved, like other animals, to win at the contest of leaving as many descendants as possible. Much of the legacy of that game strategy is still with us."

In fact, the drive to survive is at the base of most of our endeavors. At times it is symbolic survival (our penchant to archive photos, write books) and at others it is literal, as when we find new treatments for life-threatening diseases. The survival we're focused on now, however, is different than the survival Diamond writes about and which dominated our species for most of its existence. For one, today the survival effort encompasses both the species in general and the individual.

Second, survival is less focused on increasing descendants than on the meaningful, realistic, and conscious/unconscious effort to overcome the physical limits of biology. We are doing this via communication, science/medicine, and spiritual inquiry to name a few.