Why do most living beings give off body heat?
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The same reason why your car gets hot and needs cooled down. Everything requires energy. You need energy for every beat of your heart. We take in the chemical energy stored in the food we eat and convert it to motion. That conversion can’t be 100% efficient so a small portion is lost as heat energy. If every single process in the animal body was 100% efficient, we’d have a body temperature close to the temperature of the air around us.
The chemical reactions that sustain life create heat.
The human body consumes fuel and turns it into potential and kinetic energy. Many of the chemical changes that facilitate this transformation are exothermic, thus produce thermal energy as a byproduct.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that many of the processes our body performs require specific heat ranges in the mid to high 90’s, so your body intentionally tries to generate and release heat to maintenance that temperature. That’s why hypothermia kills you and kills you quickly.
I don’t think it’s really “most”, since there are a lot more cold-blooded species than there are warm blooded, plus if you’re saying “living beings” then you’re also including kingdoms other than animals (i.e. plants, fungi, etc).
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