The Tragedy of Excess
When Evolution Goes Too Far
11 Minutes
This one is gonna get dark, so you may wish to light a candle.
There’s a man climbing a mountain. And he’s thinking. They are his favourite hobbies and combine so seamlessly as to be almost beautiful. This man cherishes solitude and the rawness of the natural world. He lives simply and reflectively, avoiding the spotlight and embracing a lifestyle consistent with his philosophical conclusions.
He’s climbing like a man trying to outrun the limits of flesh itself. All sharp cheekbones, hidden beneath an ice-flacked beard, wind-burnt skin, and bright determined eyes beneath frost-stiffened wool and canvas. Around him the mountain world rises in vast white cathedrals of ice and stone. Away across the glaciers, avalanches mutter like distant artillery, and as he climbs, the air grows so thin it seems the sky itself has become glass.
There’s a deep pessimism in this man’s heart. He can’t shake it. Something about the natural order, and the human’s place in it, just doesn’t add up. So, as he climbs, he tries to work to all out, hoping the synthesis of mind and nature will lead to an enlightenment that will release him from his torment.
And then it occurs to him. All at once, and after a lifetime of deep reflection and scientific inquiry. He has an answer, and in that answer he finally has an understanding, not of the world around him, but of the much vaster one inside.
Inside all of us.
But to further understand this, we are gonna have to take a trip away from the wildness of the Norwegian mountain side where this man persists alone, and go on a long journey…
Megaloceros Giganteus
Take a walk with me. Sometime long ago. Around 10,000 years ago. We could go back further - almost half a million years further - but it would defeat the purpose of our trip – we need to go nearer to our own time so we can see that which we need to see.
If we’re lucky, and my calculations are correct, we should find ourselves in Europe, avant la lettre, maybe the western half, let’s say Doggerland - that great land bridge between the mainland and the islands now knows as the British and Irish Isles - just ‘cos that’s a place we can no longer visit, so we may as well take the opportunity.
Like Alan Grant, we’d best put our scepticism aside and find a good perch. That which we are seeking approaches in the middle distance. Disorientatingly big, so much bigger than its modern versions. 7 feet tall and 1 ton - his one is a male. It’s summertime, so its coat is reddish-brown. If we had visited later in the year, its pelt would be far paler, covering a skinnier body. Its legs are long, almost disproportionally so, but perfectly adapted to the galloping grasslands of the old continent. It appears unaware of our presence, or uninterested in it. We can be thankful for that. At full hurtling pull, it would move like a train over the ground, replete with the heavy earth rumble that precedes so much kinetic death.
Its bodily dimensions are not what is most striking about this species, however. Attached to its large head is an appendage stupefying in its breath: antlers, immense, these ones 4 meters and weighing around that of a small person.
The animal swings them back and forth along the long grass as it takes a bite here and there. And then it spots a group of females cresting a far hill, emerging from a woodland that stretches hundreds of miles back, and it stands proud, lifting the antlers in a display of sexual virility.
This big boy would kill for his mates, actual or prospective. His antlers would be his main weapon in that crashing, gouging battle. Thankfully, this time there are no other males within a day’s radius, so we will be shared the spectacle of bloodshed.
But what this animal doesn’t know, can’t know, and could have no power over the knowledge if he did know, is that the very antlers he prides himself on, that allow him to attract and fight for a mate, are the very thing that has heralded the end of his species.
But he is unbothered by this eventuality.
He’s moving off now, towards the small herd of females. The sun, younger than ours, blesses his journey across the green sea with light, warmth, and the promise of new life.
We’ll leave them to their copulation; it’s impolite to stare.
Today this creature is known as the Irish Elk, so called for the abundance of such fossils found on this little island I call home. It’s the naturally preserving peat bogs of this country that have made the fossils found here so complete - more carcasses than fossils, one could say. This preservation record includes the antlers, kept in state by the natural formaldehyde of those murky waters found throughout rural Ireland.
We, on our little journey back through time, are not the first people to encounter them. Our ancestors hunted them, for food and the materials of bone and skin. And they remembered them in their primitive art that they left on cave walls, most notably in the south of France and northern Spain.
The species finally went extinct about 7,700 years ago, 3,500 years before Uruk, due to a combination of pressures. As the climate of the late Ice Age environment changed, much of the open grasslands the elk relied on for sustenance were slowly but steadily converted by nature’s invisible hand into forest. Their enormous antlers may have become a liability in these increasingly forested environments, hampering mobility. Additionally, growing and maintaining such large antlers placed heavy nutritional demands on males, making survival harder during periods of scarcity.
I’m traveling back now… I’d advise you to come with me. There is no life here for one of us; we are not yet welcome.
Overconsciousness
The mountain climber we earlier shared a moment with was named Peter Wessel Zapffe. Along with being a mountaineer and general outdoorsman, he was also a lawyer and essayist, and, ultimately, a philosopher.
Born and raised in inside the Arctic Circle, in Tromsø, Norway, a place that drifts beneath the frozen night like a lantern afloat on a sea of northern snow, he lived much of his life in relative isolation, combining a love of the natural world with intensive intellectual reflection. Thankfully for him, Norway’s northern reaches are the ideal place to indulge in such isolation without having to try very hard, or be monomaniacally anti-social.
His most influential works include The Last Messiah (1933) and On the Tragic (1941), in which he articulates a philosophy deeply concerned with the burdens of human consciousness. Zapffe contended that humans possess a degree of self-awareness that exceeds biological necessity, creating a fundamental mismatch between our cognitive capacities and the environmental conditions in which humans evolved. Unlike other species, humans are acutely aware of mortality, suffering, and the inherent meaninglessness of life, rendering existence psychologically burdensome.
This central idea, often termed the (very linguistically cool) Overconsciousness Thesis (also known as the Theory of Overqualification or the Over-Developed Consciousness Hypothesis), argues that human consciousness is an evolutionary anomaly. Unlike the adaptive intelligence seen in other animals, which serves survival and reproductive purposes, human cognitive capacity produces existential anxiety and profound awareness of mortality that evolution did not “intend” (to the extent that evolution can be intentional). For Zapffe, human suffering is thus not random or contingent but a structural consequence of overdeveloped (self)awareness. To that end, Zapffe treated consciousness not as humanity’s crowning achievement, but as a biological malfunction, an evolutionary overshoot.
To cope with this impossibly heavy burden, humans therefore employ four primary defence mechanisms (now we find ourselves drifting on the intellectual waters towards the psychological shoreline, and the often ominous lighthouses dotted there): isolation, the avoidance of disturbing or anxiety-inducing thoughts; anchoring, the establishment of stable beliefs, ideologies, or routines that provide a semblance of meaning; distraction, the continuous engagement in work, entertainment, or social activity to avoid existential reflection; and sublimation, the channelling of existential tension into creative, intellectual, or artistic pursuits.
Zapffe also introduced the concept of the “tragic principle”, advocating what might now be recognized as a soft antinatalism - the notion that human reproduction should be limited because life inherently contains more suffering than joy. Some of you may now be seeing the parallels between his work and the work of the later Deep Ecologists. You’re not wrong, and I intend on writing on them one day in the not-too-distant future.
Zapffe was a man of science before all other things, and that is evident when reading him. Unlike the metaphysical pessimists - of whom Arthur Schopenhauer could be considered the thought leader - whose philosophy is grounded in abstract ideas about the will, Zapffe’s pessimism is biological and evolutionary. Consciousness is not a gift of the overgod’s, but a liability of the natural ones, those found in the water and the soil
Therefore, to Zapffe, human awareness is simultaneously magnificent and self-destructive.
Eikþyrnir
So, what of the Irish Elk? What is the relevance here?
Well, one of Zapffe’s most memorable metaphors is drawn from that particular animal. He compared the elk’s massive, ultimately disadvantageous antlers to human consciousness. Both are evolutionary traits that grew so excessive they became liabilities, or evolutionary excesses. Just as the elk’s antlers may have contributed to its extinction, human consciousness, in Zapffe’s view, threatens our psychological well-being by overreaching what life can reasonably support.
As a metaphor it is one of the better ones found in philosophy. It illustrates a tension between the grandeur of human cognitive abilities and their potential self-destructiveness, bringing into harsh, surgical light the broader philosophical themes about the limits of evolution and evolutionary thinking, the fragility of life, and the paradoxical costs of exceptional traits (the latter we often see in the “tortured genius” trope)
Forgive me the following indulgence, but when first reading Zapffe’s work I thought about Eikþyrnir - the Oak-Antlered - the great stag of Norse myth, who appears in the Edda’s, both poetic and prose. It’s a sacred animal connected to the circulation of life, water, and the world-tree cosmology of the Norse universe. He is the one who stands upon the roof of Valhalla, feeding from the leaves of the great tree Læraðr. From his antlers drips water into the spring Hvergelmir, from which many of the rivers of the world are said to flow.
To me there is a beautiful contrast between the Irish Elk in all its evolutionary tragedy and Eikþyrnir. Both are massive and beautiful and awe striking. One is a fountain of all life, and the other must die, must leave the evolutionary tree for good. Additionally, there is something markedly northern about Eikþyrnir. A silent stag above the hall of dead warriors, snow-light caught in his antlers while the great rivers of the world are born beneath him.
That is pretty damn cool.
Same Premise, Different Conclusion – Here Bottom of FormCometh the Camus
Zapffe’s philosophy fits within a broader tradition of existential and pessimistic thought. Thinkers before and after his time, such as the aforementioned Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard, Emile Ciron and Albert Camus (all of whom I have written on to varying degree in the past and will undoubtedly do so again in the future) have all wrestled with the topic, wrestled with the darkness, wrestled with the inevitable and horrible conclusions that approached with the turning of each mental page.
That amount of wrestling must be exhausting.
Zeroing in on Camus, we find a philosopher who offers one of the most compelling philosophical rebukes to Zapffe. He does so not by denying the bleakness of the human condition, but by refusing the conclusions Zapffe draws from it (I’m also going to note here that this is not the first time I have used Camus’ work to “rescue” a philosophical idea from the dark side of the mind – he appears to be a healer archetype of some sort; able to philosophically heal everyone but himself!).
Both thinkers begin from strikingly similar premises: the universe sucks. It is indifferent to human concerns, consciousness exposes us to mortality and suffering, and there is no guaranteed, transcendent meaning written into existence. Where they diverge in their thought, however, is in how a lucid human being ought to respond to this condition of fate.
In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus gives a name to the core problem: the “absurd” – the tectonic crash between the human longing for meaning and the universe’s refusal to provide it. Again mirroring Zapffe’s first principles, Camus insists on intellectual honesty. He rejects religious consolation, metaphysical optimism, and any philosophy that smuggles meaning in through the back door. But unlike his Norwegian compatriot, Camus argues that recognising the absurd does not logically compel resignation.
On the contrary, it opens the space for revolt.
Camus’s key move is ethical rather than metaphysical or material. He contends that the absence of ultimate meaning does not negate the value of lived experience. Zapffe sees consciousness as a burden that evolution mistakenly produced; Camus sees it as the very condition that allows dignity to thrive. To live with the full awareness of absurdity and still refuse despair is, for Camus, a moral achievement. The figure of Sisyphus - condemned to endlessly roll the stone uphill - becomes heroic not because his labour has meaning, but because he consciously embraces it without illusion. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus famously writes, not because happiness is rationally justified, but because revolt against the absurd creates value.
Where Zapffe interprets cultural activity as escapism or sublimation - as defence mechanisms - Camus interprets creation, love, and solidarity as acts of defiance. Art does not anesthetise suffering, rather it stands in opposition to it, testifying a contrary truth. Human bonds do not deny absurdity; they intensify life in full awareness of its fragility. Zapffe’s antinatalism reflects a desire to end the tragic experiment; Camus’s humanism insists that each conscious life, precisely because it is unjustified, carries an urgency and responsibility toward others, as well as towards life itself.
In other words, life is for the living, and must be lived by them and them alone, fully, from the beginning to the ending.
In essence, Camus rebuffs Zapffe by refusing to let tragedy have the final word. If Zapffe’s philosophy is a clear-eyed scientific diagnosis followed by ethical retreat, Camus’s is a clear-eyed philosophical diagnosis followed by ethical engagement. Both reject illusion, yes, but only Camus insists that meaning need not be discovered for live to be lived. In the face of the same abyss, Zapffe advocates surrender (quietly or loudly, but surrender nonetheless) while Camus answers with revolt.
Let’s Wrap This Up
The first time I came across Zapffe’s works it blew my thinking socks off. It just made so much sense. Yes, of course there is an evolutionary reason that explains why we are so like this. There had to be. The idas didn’t leave me feeling hollowed out though, which it may do for others – I found it so illuminating as to leave no room in the corners for shadows to pool.
Of course, I don’t know if it’s true or not. It might only be a snappy metaphor; there may be no actual substance to it. But I loved the way Zapffe took a different approach to things, saw the old problems in new ways, up on the high mountain passes, looking down on the vast tragedy of the world
There was a nine-year gap between Zapffe’s Last Messiah and Camus’ Sisyphus. I wonder what that time was like, when a final existential nail had been driving in to the coffin of the hope of any future by Zapffe, and a resurgence, a reanimation of that hope was led by Camus and his crowbar shaped like a pen.
I’m being silly of course - what philosophers write in quiet libraires far from the maddening crowd typically has little effect on how the world really is - but perhaps you think I’ve earned the right to be silly.
At least some of the time.
Photo by Afin Ruzl