It was depressing to see that my recent area of focus is the career of one Antonio Damasio:

1. In support of his claim, he adduces the various ways in which bacteria behave that bear a striking resemblance to human social organisation. The implication is, then, that “the human unconscious literally goes back to early life-forms, deeper and further than Freud or Jung ever dreamed of”. Damasio’s argument is that we are directly descended not only from the apes, but from the earliest wrigglers at the bottom of the primordial rock pool.
2. The keyword throughout the book is homeostasis, of which he offers a number of definitions, the clearest of which is the earliest, and which he favours enough to set it in italics: homeostasis is the force—the word seems justified—that ensures that “life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species”.
3. Damasio, whose books include The Feeling of What Happens and Self Comes to Mind, is a scientist but also a convinced, one might say a crusading, humanist. He wants us to recognise the richness of life in all its aspects, good or bad; but he is no sentimentalist. The human condition is one of struggle and assertion and the will to prevail: “Life comes equipped with a precise mandate: resist and project life into the future, no matter what.” Here again the shadow, or the radiance, of Nietzsche’s thinking falls across the page.

It is in point (2) above. The interesting idea is that the mere urge for survival, the volitional-physical imperative Survive!, is the engine not only of biological self-repair and simple pro-survival actions, but also all the higher-cognitive and highly attenuated (poetic, mystical) processes of experience, are all variegated flowerings from that same engine. The engine is simple and, at root, self-reasserting and tautological—only pro-survival systems survive. But from this every subtlety and miracle of experience arises.

LRH said the same.