What is the basis of human motivation? What is the human purpose? Why are humans the way they are? Wild animals seek food, survival and procreation, but we agree human motives are more complex than that, so what do humans seek really?

The Theory of Options teaches that humans strive to maximize options, but this statement has two meanings. Firstly, it means that humans evolved along a fitness pathway in which the most reproductively successful individuals were those whose biology was adaptable to a variety of behaviors. This occurred because the emerging hominid line was increasingly responding to change by behavioral and social adaptation and use of artifacts, rather than adapting biology to a specific environmental niche. This in turn would increase survivability because in the face of change, culture, behavior, and social organization are much easier to adapt than biology.

Next, the theory teaches that in modern life humans are motivated psychologically to maximize their options in life. By this we mean that the human psyche obtains good feeling rewards when the individual feels, or assess that the circumstances of life are under the individual's control. The self wants assurance that in any given circumstances it has choices, or options, to do or not what the self truly fancies. These feelings are very strong. The need for options, or to express freedom and opportunity can drive people to make many sacrifices, even risking death rather than live a life denied of choices. While the most wretched feelings are of loss of control, or the feeling that one has no more options in life, which can drive people to suicide. Money, power, fame and sexual attractiveness appear to give people the most options in human society, more say, than brute strength might. So people pursue these, often obsessively, as a path to maximizing individual options. While individuals backed into a social corner or facing a crisis want to know first what their real options are and how to improve them from a given point forward. Other individuals who feel that their options are exhausted lash out or fight back, often irrationally, against the forces they think have deprived them of their choices and opportunities.

Yet, we could not claim that feelings regarding options were the sole motivators of human behavior. If anything the theory of each human needing to maximize options in life is a modern one, only expressible by language or in a context of modern values. A wild animal trapped in a cage will feel its options closed off, and most animals will fight against this. But humans create mental cages and freedoms for themselves based on language, expectations and imagination. We see this in history. For thousands of years many people were told, and some still are, that they were born only to be slaves, or they should seek comfort only in a life to come. Yet at another extreme, people today are promised vast entitlements and freedoms that would overwhelm the resources of the planet and the fabric of society if each of the six billion individuals on Earth was granted them fully. Advertisements and movies promise people that they can have all manner of wonderful things, until the options that are imaginable become discordant with the options that are possible, or even necessary to real circumstances. Or some individuals do through good fortune acquire great wealth or power, only often this might not yield the options in life to which a person felt entitled. Especially, if a person in a powerful or influential position felt trapped into acting out a role presented by social prejudices, this is not real options, and the deep psyche would detect the frustration. The modern, higher psychology sees its options in terms of the values that modern society implants. But the deep, lower, evolutionary psychology sees its options from an evolutionary program on the ancient savanna. The modern psychology might construe maximum options in sex as a glamorous partner, but the evolutionary program will have different values again. Often, some will claim mostly, these values conflict.

Moreover, the connection between options as psychological motivation and options as a way to explain human evolution is not that explicit. Animals are motivated to do what their bodies and minds are good at. Horses like to gallop and dogs like to run with the pack. Most of this is by instinct but higher animals also have a sense of psychological exhilaration, and can be trained to enjoy activities they might not pursue in the wild. Humans, with a larger brain and far more choices in behavior evolved to be versatile and intelligent, and are rewarded for expressing attributes that they naturally perform well. Humans enjoy a biological reward for being members of a fecund species, plus humans have good feelings when fulfilling natural needs for food, sex, survival, and procreation. But the main impetuses for humans are powerful emotions such as love, hate, pride, jealousy or loneliness, striking the psyche as biochemically induced mood. Facial expression and voice inflection are also powerful communicators of emotion among humans, reflecting the evolutionary needs of strong group communication. If humans seek love, honor or meaning in life, they are motivated by values they have learned, but also by evolutionary impetuses which motivate the psyche. Only while physical emotions have a direct evolutionary basis they only engender social options through a chain cultural inculcation. The Theory of Options teaches only that in considering the evolutionary and cultural imperatives together, if we generalize this as need to maximize options it is not far off the mark, theoretically and practically of what humans actually do.

So, to say that humans seek to maximize options does not mean there is a gene specifically evolved to motivate humans that way, like a genetic motive for sex or food. Rather, many factors motivate human behavior, both physiologically and psychologically. Just that a theory, formed in modern language from modern ideas that humans are motivated to maximize the options of behavior makes more sense as a generalization than many rival explanations. Plus, this is an easier theory to relate to how humans evolved. This is again a difficulty of explanation. What is logical in evolution does not always make sense as human psychology and certainly not everyday sense in how humans perceive themselves to behave. Yet, humans maximizing the options of behavior can be related more easily to both how humans evolved and how modern humans are motivated. But this is still only a statement that needs evaluation against other facts we know.

So, what are the true deep motivators of human behavior, if we put options to one side?

The primal motive is physical sensation, both as direct stimulus and biochemically induced mood or emotion. Next is the motivation of the deep psychology that triggers release of mood, or contemplates actions that might result in pleasure or pain, emotional or direct. Finally, there is the rational consciousness, which tries to make autonomous decisions about life overriding emotional or sentient effects. Lincoln suffered emotional pain during the civil war, as the tragedy of a nation torn asunder and his own family that he could not devote time to. Yet, his life became the paragon of steadfast resolution to fulfill a greater goal, no matter what the personal costs. Other people through history have faced personal pain or sacrifice for a greater good, which is the essential element of the story of Jesus. Only while we admire this as a model of behavior, we presume that the human experience was to also realize that not fulfilling greater goals carries an emotional pain too. There is a saying that cowards die a thousands deaths. Death in instinctive perception is pain and fear, but the human experience is that there are times when not dying will also bring pain and anguish. Interestingly then, in evolution death is only unfit if by its occurrence the individual's DNA is not passed on. So, among humans in war there are "war marriages". The man gets the opportunity to reproduce before he is sent off to fight, plus society vows to care for orphans. Only when these conventions were formed nobody knew about evolution theory. They only knew about ordinary human feelings and traditions, and adapted these in ways to maximize group options.

We hope that in each generation less humans will have to confront the traumatic options of war. Even so, in everyday life humans still face choices over motive, in terms of what feels good and satisfies the soul. Most humans at some stage in life face at least the family versus duty dilemma. People want company and companionship as a basic longing, but people also have careers and social obligations, even to the family, which override the need of warmth and companionship. Some people also obtain fame and fortune, but rising to it can be as meteoric as the fall. So, should one gamble a life of quiet comfort for the potential of a few years in the spotlight? Each person must make the choice. We each try to detach obligation from emotion. We try to be strong. But we can never completely escape our feelings. Descartes said I think therefore I am, but we feel too, and therefore we are too. Or we might know what is rationally correct as obligation and duty, but still suffer the dilemmas of star-crossed love, or other physical or emotional allures. We like our life to have enjoyment while we live, but as humans we want it also to have meaning after we are dead. Sometimes we just do not know which we want more, or how to strike a balance among the options even if we did know.

In earlier times religion often provided guidance of how to face these dilemmas of life, but today people want scientific explanations. It is felt that if we could somehow understand the deep motive in terms of evolution we could find better answers, or at least better understand the motives of other people that we deal with. Based on what has been discussed in this book the advice is to choose the path that leaves the most options for change open. This way the individual can both stay flexible plus, according to the theory, good feelings internally will reward choices widely made. Only each choice must be balanced to a circumstance. Staying single might appear to offer the most options in life, but people who enjoy marriage and children seem on average to have more fulfilling lives emotionally than those who stay single. Yet, while an evolutionary motive to pass on DNA is genuine, it is never an overriding human concern. Despite what the evolutionists say the human gene pool is hugely mixed, and the action of any one individual in modern populations barely alters it. In sociobiology much inference is drawn from the behavior of tyrants in history who tried to be prolific procurers of offspring, as though this was "proof" of DNA as motive. But we have no evidence of any successful societies sustained that way. For all we know as facts the motive for tyrants to procure thousands of offspring could have been megalomania, just like building huge palaces. While any population born from enforced breeding, which is contrary to the human norm, might as easily have turned out to be a genetically weakened race of idiots.

Thus, even using evolution we can never tie human motivation to an exact genetic map, and claim that this is the one true naturalistic basis of behavior. About 70-85% of human behavior is learned anyway. Only it is complicated, because the social learning is strongly influenced by physical and emotional experiences of individuals and the species, tied back to an evolutionary program by a less direct route. The physical passions humans experience exist because of evolution, but the thoughts in the higher cortex which trigger those passions exist because of a social and cultural learning process. Only part of that learning process is that the passions are strong and must be accommodated. So, the culture too becomes partially tied to forces that the physical passions invoke. Very little is left in the average brain for truly autonomous evaluation free of all influence, both direct from biology and from biology acting through culture.

Except in the interpretation of human behavior the evolutionary influences acting through culture get turned around, not from biological passions that humans feel but from the modern theory of DNA-induced behavior as now misunderstood. People throughout history felt the physical passions and interpreted them how they did into human culture, as ideas about God, love, duty or the meaning of life. Only this interpretation is often opposite how we misunderstand the passions in evolutionary theory. The theory teaches that individuals should behave selfishly, whereas the historic interpretation is that individuals should behave altruistically, towards a greater good. The theory is that there is no evolutionary advantage to moral constraint if it is not a means for individuals to pass on DNA. Yet, if we took that theory literally and structured our moves around passing on maximum DNA through many offspring it would make no sense at all. Ironically, our powerful body's biochemistry would strongly warn us that this was not the purpose of life. Life has many options for fulfillment, and too many offspring would close the options off in a single direction, without in any case producing any measurable effect on the total human gene mix. So here evolutionary theory does not explain anything, and we are still left wondering what truly motivates us in an evolutionary sense.

Only the Theory of Options is a method, again of explanation, to turn the argument round further. It teaches that humans evolved at a highly advanced, saturated state of life on Earth, when the only fitness pathway of large animal evolution which still lay open was moving adaptation outside of biology anyway. Humans still had to biologically modify along that path, but that was when the population was small and evolving. Anyway, the mechanisms of how it all worked, though complex, are explained in other chapters, and the facts of evolution fully support this new explanation. The only point we need bother with here is that in the theory correctly understood humans did evolve to maximize the options of behavior. Plus in a theoretical sense maximum options occur when the prime constraints on behavior are moral or psychological ones, because physically these are the easiest constraints to change. We are not certain if explaining this will have the impact of teaching people they should be moral because they will roast in Hell if they are not. But in the new theory knowledge in any case is to increase options, not force behavior along particular paths. People want to know what all their options are, both in religious and secular terms. Evolution as ruthless selfishness is only one understanding of it at least as it applies to human behavior, and an increasingly isolated understanding even in science.

So, let us recap how also from the facts of evolution, we can arrive at a totally different understanding of human behavior, one allowing for moral restraint and powerful motives from the psychology, rather than from direct biology.

To write about how moral impetus as personal motive relates to evolution is a trap. We can, and will, list the arguments why, though humans evolved from lower forms they are still morally responsible as individuals. But the reverse argument, that evolution proves that humans are or not morally accountable has no validity. There is no relationship of evolution to moral accountability that to an individual intelligent enough to understand it would make a difference. Milton said 'God left free the will'. Only if the artificer of the human form was not God, but a process of natural selection over billions of years this in no way lessens the burden of moral accountability. Human experience such as the Nuremberg Trails established the extent to which humans are morally accountable. It has nothing to do with how evolution works.

Yet, apart from legal, ethical, and social responsibilities incumbent on behavior, each human possesses an intimate moral guide of deep feelings of biochemically induced mood. These moods and feelings must have evolved for a primal fitness need, so if we can explain what that fitness need is we can do two things. First, we can offer a secular explanation of moral feelings, not tied to religious belief. This will increase human options because it will provide humans a broader base of secular knowledge supplementing religious tradition, concerning how they will behave. Next, we will clarify several misunderstandings over evolution itself. Today, the Theory of Evolution clashes with religious belief in two areas, but only one area is human origins. Where some religions still cling to the pre-scientific teaching that humans were created by a divine power, the Theory of Evolution provides a modern, scientific explanation of how all complex life on Earth evolved from simpler forms. Except religion originated not just to explain human origins in pre-scientific terms, but something more complex. This is the intimate guides to behavior each human individually experiences, and the impression that each action is being watched or judged in moral terms. Religion has an explanation for this impression that often makes sense in terms of human intimate experience, even if it makes no scientific sense. And to the extent that the Theory of Evolution implies that these feelings do not exist merely because they have no scientific explanation that is easily understood, the Theory of Evolution is wrong or incomplete in this area.

The previous chapters on religion, ethics and morals explained why, correctly understood, these intimate feelings would arise by evolution, as direct fitness. The problem, why it was not discovered before, seems to be that orthodox theory holds that motive can only exist as reflex, and then directly related to a gene that is passed on. This theory works for insects or some higher animals for behaviors that are instinctive, but not behaviors that exist as emotional impetus, even for animals less emotionally motivated than humans. If we say that horses are motivated by pride, there is not specifically a "pride" gene motivating them. In nature horses compete for mates by displaying graceful, powerful movement, and their naturally evolved biochemistry makes them feel exhilarated when they gallop fast, or move with particular grace, beauty or power. Humans exploit these natural attributes of horses for human purposes more say, than they would try to exploit these particular attributes in a cow. We even say horses are courageous animals. They are actually animals of flight, except as a survival strategy they feel exhilarated when they charge forward overcoming the fear of what might lie ahead. Humans can very successfully exploit this natural attribute too. Similarly, dogs have natural attributes of loyalty and friendship evolved for survival in the wolf pack. Humans can exploit these attributes too for human needs, more than they would be able to utilize the loyalty attributes of a lizard, if such emotions even exist in reptiles.

When we examine humans as a species we find that they too have natural attributes of courage, loyalty, friendship and pride, which can also be strongly utilized in a group context. Humans have other natural attributes, such as very powerful emotional regulation, high natural intelligence including foresight, and strong aural and visual communication including voice inflection and facial emotion, for conveying feelings to others. Plus humans are a group-dependent species, more so than horses or dogs, to the extent that the human birth process is impossible outside of its group context. Taken together, all these natural attributes in combination with a language that can express precise ideas make humans what we might call a morally pliable species. Horses can be easily trained as cavalry mounts, and dogs can be easily trained to fetch, though humans have bred these once wild animals in ways to accentuate the natural qualities humans can exploit. Only humans themselves have evolved in ways that they can easily be taught moral precepts as guides to behavior. This takes two forms. We can teach humans moral precept as a process of reasoning, such that every action has a consequence and unwise actions will have unpleasant consequences. Because humans are already creatures of planning and foresight they can readily follow this chain of reasoning. Only we can also teach humans that if they commit acts that others judge as foolish or immoral, they will suffer inner torment as direct feelings. Just as if they commit only wise, worthwhile or altruistic acts, they will enjoy inner peace and happiness. So far there is no chain of reasoning that explains why this is, unless it is linked to a religious explanation involving metaphysical causes of the inner feelings.

Yet, any feelings that strike us physiologically such as change of heart rate, facial contortion, sweating, tears, pupil dilation, or biochemical changes producing emotions of warmth, cold, elation or trauma, are effects of the autonomic nervous system. We have little data to quantify whether or how much the human physiological emotions are more refined than in chimps, but they do seem more intense. The physiological basis of these emotions can only have evolved for the fitness advantage it conferred on the individual. This is the debate. If a bee sacrifices itself for the good of the hive it is a moral-appearing act to humans. But to the bee it is mere reflex determined by a long process to pass on a net gain of the bee's DNA, or cousin DNA, more than not behaving that way. Increase in heart-rate, anger, and a pit feeling in the stomach is reflex in humans, that also evolved because those reactions passed on more net DNA among individual ancestors than not reacting that way. When human soldiers sacrifice themselves in war they also experience these feelings, and are strongly motivated by them. Except human physiological motives were pre-adapted, as a set of motivational impulses evolved to fulfill many needs, triggered by other thoughts not directly related to reflex in the higher cortex. So, the impetus motivating the bee to self-sacrifice is not the same as the one motivating the human, despite that all motives ultimately arise from evolution to fulfill fitness needs.

Philosophically then, the bee acts from reflex, so however moral the act appears there is no evaluation of a moral type. Only the contrast between how a bee and a human soldier behaves is not just a philosophical difference. Throughout the history of life animals have evolved more complex modes of thought to increase options. If we program a robot planetary probe to evaluate the mission goals, it is more versatile than a probe that can respond only to a simple set of cause-and-effect instructions. Similarly, a creature with emotional values is more versatile because it can respond to novel situations. Humans act from a combination of reflex and learning. Any act of reflex without choice or evaluation cannot be morally motivated even if it has that appearance. Human reflex, such as shielding the eyes against dust, or grasping for support when falling is not morally evaluated. While if humans exhibited a single consistent behavior, such as the male sealing off the female vagina after copulation, we would allow such a behavior as genetic, but many natural behaviors are non-consistent in ways that could not be tied to a single gene. The horse is an animal of fear and flight, yet even the rider-less horse charges forward with the troop into danger, but not because of any single gene. A dog will sacrifice itself for its master, and there are cases of dogs in a fire sacrificing their own offspring to save the master's offspring. But we could never find a gene that makes it fit behavior for an animal to sacrifice its own life or the life of its offspring for that of another species. Rather from all the attributes which domestic animals exhibit, we must examine what has been selected by nature or bred by humans, that facilitates such loyalty or duty.

Similarly, with human behavior we must examine what was selected and why. The primary fitness need of humans was for a large brain and flexible behavior. Jut it is fitter to motivate large brains psychologically than design each circuit of the upper neurology for reflex. The human brain expanded in size rapidly, with a 15% increase of cranial capacity in the last few hundred thousand years. There was not time over such a short evolutionary period to design a billion extra neural circuits for reflex for very small change of DNA, especially in the highly homogenized frontal cortex. Plus preprogrammed circuits of reflex are inflexible because whatever effort it would take to design each one, it would take as much effort again to alter them when conditions changed. Meanwhile, the part of the brain controlling the emotions physiologically was small and designed for reflex anyway. It was more efficient for nature to refine these circuits to provide even stronger emotional motivation to humans. All that would be necessary for the whole system to work is that the thoughts of the higher cortex would connect to strong emotional triggers in the inner brain.

This is how we see the brain today. For half-a-billion years neural systems evolved towards increasing generalization of functions of the higher cortex, and specialization of the lower functions. This trend would not reverse in the last few hundred thousand years of human evolution to specialize responses in the higher cortex, especially when there was no evolutionary need to. Genes specialize the stimulus and response functions of the physiology, and they highly specialize emotional responses in humans. Only while one set of genes specialize emotional responses to input, separate genes form the higher cortex used for processing thoughts by themselves. All sentience whether from external or internal stimuli is expressed in the lower parts of the brain by specialized functions. Thoughts in the higher cortex have the power to trigger emotions, but are not directly connected to response outputs themselves. Physically, about 85% by mass, but possibly 95% by circuit of the connections of neurons within the higher brain are with each other for leaning, imagination and reflection. All physical input and output including the control of the physical emotions and regulation of the vital functions is controlled by about 15% of the neural mass, and possibly only 5% of its circuits.

But what is the evolutionary connection between thoughts in the higher brain and the output of feelings in response to thoughts? The physical expression of emotion must have been selected by evolution. But which thoughts were the physical emotions selected to express?

This of course, is the great debate of our era. In theories such as sociobiology, a single gene directs an entire motivational transaction from start to finish. Whether the emotion is love, pride, or jealousy, the gene directs the initial stimulus into the higher cortex of thoughts invoking the emotion, then drives expression of the emotion itself as physiological mood. In our new theory we reject this as an unlikely design of a neural system. The human gene pool constructs a biological entity that optimizes complex transactions across different neural functions. For example, data about an emotional event is gathered in one part of the neural mechanism, it is sorted into an emotional meaning in another part, and produces an emotional reaction in a third. Data gathering and sorting segments of the neural mechanism are emotionally neutral in terms of instinctive behavior, while the response segment of the human emotional system is incredibly powerful. This allows the range of human behavior. Humans can be motivated to acts of good or evil, depending on the triggers from the higher cortex. Just that when the decision of the higher cortex is passed on to motor neurons, especially those for releasing body chemicals, they can produce very powerful responses.

To say that humans instinctually enact this or that emotion then, is to say that when the higher cortex issues certain trigger commands, human biology is optimized to respond. So the human form has been selected to exhibit powerful emotional responses to stimuli, but particular responses are strongly influenced by the learning process. This offers the most options. Roughly, the same intensity of feeling can be motivated from several different sources of input, depending on circumstance and learning, which is flexible behavior from an evolutionary standpoint. As intelligent beings we try to keep thoughts logically free from an emotion content, but the human psychology is evolved in ways so that thoughts are never that free. Almost everyone is touched in life emotional tragedy, but civilization demands that we still be ruled by logic, not passion. Most of our philosophy is teaches us how to think in this detached, logical manner, and it is the behavior expected of mature adults in control of their personalities. But the are also the deep emotional triggers to the human core, and most of our art, poetry and song is about emotion, not logic.

Social provisions that humans have developed while organizing society, such as wealth, property, and social status, further complicate determining human goals. Natural humans drives are to increase options, but within civilization options are realized through the social institutions that humans have invented to make society work. It is easy to confuse the purpose of these institutions at both extremes. One view is that the institutions of society, especially wealth and property, form this infamous characteristic of being non-naturalistic, as though any contrivance of human invention could be anything but non-naturalistic. The other extreme is to make a fetish of objects and institutions, without examining the deep human drives to which our inner sentiments are accountable. The prime culprit is money. People covert it because money in our society has become a direct measure of options. But while money is essential in securing basic needs, its possession can only be fulfilling in an emotional sense if it keeps reinvigorating our drive for increased options, and satisfaction with the inner self. Individuals who seem to handle this best, of those who have money, are ones with autonomous goals who can employ wealth not as an end in itself, but for its true social purpose of increasing options.

We see this in the workplace today. Many people who work in industry, or even the government, have undoubtedly faced over the last few years management initiatives for making work smoother. Words like focus, efficiency, and restructuring are bandied about, but usually whatever way the news is bad. Often such words lead to redundancies and job cuts. But even for those who stay the emphasis is that you will work harder. Perhaps more fearful than that, is that you will have to change your methods of work. You will have to do more planning, be more accountable, take more initiatives, expose your practices more to your colleagues, and accept criticism from you colleagues of where your weaknesses are. Under capitalism, we like to think there are a few 'risk takers' at the top, who make the big decisions and suffer the exposure, while those lower down live in a safer cocoon of following orders. But for modern businesses to run efficiently, the risk taking initiatives and accountability must be shared all the way down. Even so, the new initiative is usually rounded off with the assurance that for those who stay, once the new methods are adopted, work will be more fun.

But suggesting that working harder, taking more risks and being held accountable can be more fun raises another question. In general, as human cultural evolution progresses on this planet does life for ordinary citizenry become better, or become worse? Clearly, some circumspection is required here. Throughout history, war, invasion, disease, famine, tyranny and disaster have brought catastrophe to millions of people, and it still happens today. Yet, humans had a motive for wanting civilized existence. Hobbes taught that life for prehistoric man was nasty, brutish, and short, and because of that humans entered in what became known as a social contract of civilized existence. The Theory of Options teaches that humans were the loosers of the Darwinian struggle in the wild. Human emergence occurred because humans wanted escape from the brute struggle over food and procreation. The method of escape was to force new disciplines on human behavior, by constraining it to seek shared human goals outside the raw needs of biological competition between individuals, such that the biology itself selected those humans most fit for the new type of struggle.

Even so, life for humans is still a competition, only it is one moved outside the raw goals of biology, to avoid the "zero sum" effect the biological competition produces. Biologically two males competing for procure offspring from a single female must have a "zero sum" result. Yet when two humans compete they can both end up beneficiaries, though not over mates, but only providing they are constrained to compete for a goal outside immediate needs of biology. For example, if the competition was to be the most skilled hunter, the group as a whole will benefit if the kill is still shared, and lessons from the competition are passed on. In nature, the Darwinian struggle produces a form of biological synergy, where from the struggle among individuals the species as a whole adapts to environmental change. But unlike biological synergy which is held to levels fixed by the slow process of natural selection cultural synergy can only be produced by effectively reinventing the goals, or pushing them higher each time. A few years ago during the "flower power" era, it was thought human problems could be solved if all humans loved each other. Humans should love each other, but they will compete instinctually too, so the challenge is to define goals for the entire family of humanity which are shared and beneficial, but still encourage individual aspiration.

The great problem of humanity, however, once humans moved beyond simple tribal society was ensuring that competition between individuals was carried out in a manner that always brought forth the best human qualities. Human individuals compete to enhance individual options just as animals compete to enhance individual biological fitness. But working out how this competition applied to complex social structure beyond the tribe was without any natural precedent. Nature evolved humans to be social animals, but only for the social structures that Nature had evolved. So just as there is no naturalistic ethics, there is also no naturalistic social or political structure for civilization, which humans should be adapting to in the sense of what nature intended. So, humans had to improvise as society developed, and there have been horrible mistakes. Only after thousands of years of civilization are societies moving towards recognizable democracies, with agreed rights such as legislature by election, or equality before the law. But even here there is controversy over the goals. The most democratic society inherits structures and prejudices from the past, and while equality before the law is an agreed right, no one is sure if this means that all abilities can be equally developed, or if from equal abilities every individual is prepared to make equal contributions.

If we look at the situation in the wild nature produces genetic variation precisely so that if new environmental challenges arise, at least some individuals will be better adapted to the new conditions. It is genetic variability that makes evolution possible to the extent that genes which themselves produce variability in organisms are among those genes which hedge the safest possible bets against all possible outcomes. Even so, the struggle through genetic variation is not the primary means of human adaptation. For humans, far greater opportunities for what is ultimately a biological adaptation come through social and cultural variation than are available through direct biological competition. But for this to work genes must still make humans competitive, adventurous, and innovative in a social sense, so that the cultural variability is there. This must have been especially important in prehistory for competition between groups, where superior technology or social organization developed in one group can offer overwhelming competitive advantages. Perhaps it is a result of genes such as this, distributed throughout the human population, which often result in new discoveries or inventions occurring at roughly the same time in more than one place.

But there are other ways, by which a human need for cultural variability will place pressures on the group. It will, for example, place a premium on leadership or strong and inspiring personality. Though other species have leaders these are usually are chosen on strength or native cunning, but such leaders at most can only set biological goals. Yet, the human problem is to continuously reinvent goals, creating new challenges beyond the biological denominator while adequate goal creation for the group is a major human problem. This explains the undue influence strong leaders have on humans, but it also explains why providing leadership and inspiration are important human qualities. This has become a problem of human political organization outside the tribe, because prior to democracy there were no certain mechanisms for ensuring renewal of leadership, or that the best suited people held leadership power. This is also the problem that modern business has uncovered, in that not all people, even in administratively significant positions, have proper leadership abilities in terms of setting goals or motivating others. In these terms an equal society would not be one in which all people held equal authority, but only one in which authority became more equitably based on leadership ability. Significantly, because humans need goals outside of biology, humans as a group need leaders who can set challenging goals and motivate the abilities of others.

A further problem bearing on the human species is that morality is a constraint on humans, forcing them into behavioral geodesics beyond predictable biological paths. The human purpose is the sublimation in life of material constraints for moral ones, because if humans strive to increase options then maximum options occur when all constraints on behavior are moral. Only we must remember that humans chose this path. They could have remained animals in the wild, just as any individual today can take himself to live in a spot of remote jungle, if there is any left on the planet, to live a life again free from moral constraint. But most humans do not choose this. They want the advantages of living within the human social group, but often without the dilemma, accountability, and confrontation with options moral existence entails. We see two extremes from this behavior. The common one is people not willing to be held morally accountable for behavior, until some circumstance overtakes them. The other extreme is people who through some circumstance inherit great wealth or privilege, but become unsure how to exercise the options this brings in ways enabling human satisfaction. As the wealth and options of society grow, this too becomes a fresh moral pressure.

Thus, when we examine the human purpose in society we return to the meaning of options in a literal sense. We all live in a partially constrained universe. One constraint we have is a past that we inherit, which with all its faults, all we can do is to learn from it. Yet, however our past was it becomes our individual jumping off point for the next step in our future. This future will also contain constraints, some determined by our past, some by the physics of the universe, and some by the natural geodesics of human behavior. But precisely because we inherit so many constraints we should maximize those opportunities we as individuals can change. This is another principle we have learned this from modern management theory. Every organization inherits a structure, and it inherits a set of constraints of what can be done to change. But the locus of change in an organization still lies with the individual. This is why there is so much emphasis on people in the modern organization. In the computer age, when mental tedium can be done by machines and competition is fierce, the human potential of every individual must be leveraged to make the difference. Especially, we have become too used to criticizing institutions and leaders, without realizing that all any person can do as an individual is initiate change from where each individual stands within the individual locus. This applies to effecting all change throughout society, only it becomes most noticeable in modern business because here the competition has become so fierce.

Regardless of which individual discovers it then, the Theory of Options, or a version of it, will arise at a juncture when science starts to apply theories of evolution to human behavior. This is because evolution explains how life, complexity, and thought arise from mechanical processes. Only the very point to increasing human options is that humans are not tied to response by reflex, but freely decide actions from choices that they make. Ironically though, we make better, wiser choices if we understand the "hidden" motives influencing our decisions. This leads us to again study the causes of our decisions through science. So, we seem to enter a diminishing cycle of attempting to scientifically understand motives of our decisions, but at each step reducing the range of choices, which we imagine that we might freely make.

Still, there are solutions to this conundrum. In management science much effort is directed towards identifying in the minds of executives something referred to as the psychological "baggage" of decision making. This is the prejudices, paradigms, childhood fears and hidden agendas, which affect the quality of decision making. Except understanding hidden motives scientifically will not reduce human choices, but increase them, by encouraging an emotive free evaluation of options. The weakness of the theory is that of the billions of people on Planet Earth, only a minuscule fraction of them obtain training of this type. Especially, in the world's pressure spots we see poverty, hunger, violence and loss of hope place unbearable emotional pressures on the evaluative mental processes of individuals. The result is responses of anger, violence, and rage. Such events in turn send at least some scientists scurrying back to laboratories to discover yet again, which forces "really" motivate human behavior. The modern debate over human nature begins at this point.

The Theory of Options offers some relief from this cycle of trying to broaden the range of our choices, by reducing the number of behaviors that we know that we can enact from unconstrained motives. It does this by teaching that the deepest human drive is to increase options, so that the study of human motives becomes pitched at two levels. At one level we study how humans should behave when they posses a normal range of options. At another level we study how humans do behave, when their usual options in life are closed off.