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no effort to hide from snakes and owls would quickly be gobbled up, and its lugubrious germ line would die with it. We would never meet such indifferent creatures because their genes would never have survived. Its striving cousins, on the other hand, who do everything to live on and fill the world with their offspring, would pass on their striving genes. Soon enough, the world would be full of only those mice with fighting spirit. Natural selection produces self-perpetuators.
    As a consequence, as the sociologist Raymond D. Gastil wrote, “all forms of life behave as if persistence into the future—immortality—were the basic goal of their existence.” Everything that living things do is directed toward this goal. The leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that gut feelings, complex emotions and our sophisticated reasoning processes all exist to contribute, directly or indirectly, to the aim of survival. The biological anthropologist James Chisholm deduced further that all values—all ideas of good and bad, right and wrong—arise from this single goal, as he put it, “the complex action for the sake of which bodies exist: indefinite continuance.”
    The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called this primal urge simply “the will to live.” Given, however, that it is not limited in time—that, as Chisholm said, the continuance we desire is “indefinite”—we should instead call it the will to live
forever
, or the will to immortality.
    This drive can explain a great deal of what we do, including much of civilization. The first of the four basic immortality narratives—Staying Alive—is simply the will to live forever in its basic form, and staying alive is something we humans have become very good at, spreading across the globe to countless differentclimates and habitats, where we enjoy, by mammalian standards, exceptionally long lifespans. But the other three forms of immortality narrative go far beyond the animal urges to flee from fire or store food for the winter—and, indeed, sometimes run contrary to them. Although motivated by the will to immortality, these narratives are the products not only of what we have in common with other living things but also of what sets us apart.
THE MORTALITY PARADOX
    W HAT sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the
Mortality Paradox
, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization.
    Both halves of this paradox arise from the same set of impressive cognitive faculties. Since the advent some two and a half million years ago of the genus
Homo
, the immediate ancestors of modern humans, our brain size has tripled. This has come with a series of crucial conceptual innovations: First, we are aware of ourselves as distinct individuals, a trait limited to only a handful of large-brained species and considered to be essential for sophisticated social interaction. Second, we have an intricate idea of the future, allowing us to premeditate and vary our plans—also anability unseen in the vast majority of other species (one of the rare exceptions being the case of the chimpanzee in Furuvik, Sweden, who collected stones by night to throw at zoo visitors by day). And third, we can imagine different