From Impulse to Program and Back Again: The Particularization of the Ideal
"To see traces of the Utopian everywhere… is to naturalize it and imply that it is somehow rooted in human nature". Biologists in general and evolutionary scientists, in particular, would not hesitate to concede to this somewhat Freudian suggestion, posited by Jameson in his 2005 book Archaeologies of the future: the desire called Utopia and other science fictions . A frequently recited maxim in academic biological circles is that life is an extremely unfavorable energetic and dynamic state, as contrasted with death which is a state of easily self-perpetuating equilibrium. Similarly, the very rhetoric of Darwinian evolution implies that life inherently seeks better circumstances, with phrases such as "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection", in which the most enviable position belongs implicitly to the organism best suited to his or her or its surroundings. While Utopianism does seem to be a natural individual quality, idealism has not always been