In this nonfiction work, psychiatrist Lesk warns that humanity’s successful evasion of natural hazards has stalled evolution and triggered a civilizational crisis.

The author, a medical doctor, aims to build an interdisciplinary bridge between thermodynamics, neurobiology, and Freudian psychoanalysis to diagnose the modern human condition. He argues that by neutralizing the “crucible” of daily predatory survival, humans have thrown Darwinian natural selection into a dizzying, dysfunctional “free fall.” Such evolutionary decoupling replaces hardwired reproductive directives with a paralyzing “selection by indecision,” he asserts, leaving modern youth adrift in an existential vacuum of declining birthrates and what he characterizes as confusion about gender roles. He says that “antropy,” a term he’s coined to describe entropy’s more defiant adversary, sits at the crossroads of all these notions and offers some form of cosmic hope. “ANTROPY,” per Lesk, is “EVOLUTION PLUS TIME,” which holds potential energy to maintain biological complexity. About 50,000 years ago, he says, the sudden arrival of language allowed our human ancestors to suppress dopamine, strengthen the ego, and cast chaotic impulses into the abyss of the unconscious. But because this linguistic wiring is evolutionarily infantile, one’s biochemical ability to suppress dopamine frequently slips, according to the author. Lesk thus characterizes modern psychiatric disorders as evolutionary “mismatches” and “‘behavioral’ psychoses”—temporary defensive postures adopted to avoid a cognitive takeover of humankind’s primitive, preverbal past. Over the course of this work, Lesk effectively aims to deliver a startling wake-up call to what he portrays as a rudderless society. To that end, he writes in an eccentric, raw prose style that occasionally devolves into frantic, capitalized warnings, as when he discusses what he predicts will be a takeover by artificial intelligence: “We are set to give birth to a mutation that is smarter and better organized, more capable of reasoning than we are, EXACTLY THE SITUATION WE WERE IN WITH THE CHIMPANZEES.” It all lays the groundwork for an urgent, dystopian picture of a lonely future in which people “do not seek connection to any other human and eschew marriage, sex, family or human touch altogether.”

An earnest, downbeat evolutionary argument, hampered by overenthusiastic prose.