THE ARTIFICIAL SELECTION: On Endurance, Identity, and the Engineering of an Uninhabited Now

This essay examines whether endurance is necessary for identity. Drawing on Darwin’s distinction between natural and artificial selection, it argues that contemporary institutions increasingly redirect pressures that once tested beings through direct contact with the conditions of their existence. The result is the preservation of form without the formative processes through which bodies, ecosystems, cities, and traditions become what they are. Using the Ship of Theseus, ecological examples, and the author’s lemniscate model of time, the essay develops the concept of the “Uninhabited Now”: a present increasingly occupied by forms that persist yet are not deeply marked by passage through reality.