Evolution Is A Chemical Reaction In Four Dimensions

What do fatal human difficulties and ecstatic joy have in common?

They are both expressions of a schism in the consistency between environmental complexity and the complexity of natural selection in humans. In other words, the Darwinian rules have changed since before addiction and suicide, for example; when society, culture and language did not yet exist.

This change was simply the initiation of natural selection's causality into a more abstract and powerful realm. An individual is not physically attached to what they are addicted to or to their suicidal stimulus; people follow the momentum of their thoughts, most of which are older than them and outlive them as well, like religion or genetic predisposition for schizophrenia.

It is not as if lesser animals cannot become addicted to a substance, the addiction merely manifests itself as a co-evolution like bees to pollen. When co-evolution does not occur, as in the case of addiction, it is because the environmental context, such as an institutional drug war, is operating inconsistently relative to the default, structureless context of any individual who would otherwise be free to utilize a novel compound instead of be enslaved to it like much of the natural world and numerous indigenous populations.

Researchers are increasingly realizing, as another example, that cancer is the result of aberrant environmental influences. There is nothing evolutionary about a tumor - it is an unconscious genetic rebellion that directly results from its limited resilience to our wildly overconfident industrial tampering. Or as Caitlin astutely noted, "why do they want me to mail in the tops of my yogurt for cancer research when the yogurt comes in cancerous, non-recyclable plastic?"

Now picture a double-helix of causality:

An abstract cause to a concrete effect is the feeling of romance to a wedding day, though the feeling of romance does not always result in a wedding.
A concrete cause to an abstract effect to pair with this is dopamine surges to the feeling of joy at the altar, though years of dopamine surges do not always culminate in the ecstatic joy made possible at the altar.

So when we ask "why," we are really asking an abstract form of "how," and when we are asking "how," we are really asking a concrete form of "why." The threshold rests in whether or not the causalities come directly or indirectly in contact.

"Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized."
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces