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

This paper asks whether endurance is constitutive of identity. It argues that beings become what they are through sustained contact with the conditions of their existence, and that contemporary economic and technological systems increasingly redirect rather than abolish such pressures. Darwin’s concept of natural selection is interpreted not as a moral ideal, but as a model of structural honesty: survival under real constraint reveals what a being actually is. By contrast, modern forms of “artificial selection” privilege compatibility with maintenance systems over genuine transformation. Through analyses of the Ship of Theseus, ecological replacement, anti-aging maintenance culture, commodified spirituality, and the lemniscate model of temporality, the paper develops the concept of the “Uninhabited Now”: a present increasingly filled by forms that persist while lacking the interior depth generated through genuine passage, loss, and reconstitution. A theological reading of the Now as dependent on a self-sustaining ground is proposed as one interpretive model rather than as a presupposed conclusion.