I was in another thread and someone made the comment “literally the only motivating force for any life is actually genetic material’s incentive to propagate itself.”
And that got me thinking, “yeah, I obviously know that the ultimate end goal for an organism is passing on its genes… but why?” Why does that matter, or rather why is it a goal for genetic material to propagate and perpetuate itself? What is the “incentive” here and WHY is that an incentive?
In: Biology
It’s not a goal, it just happens. If some specific genetic material tends to propagate itself more than other variants then, well, there becomes more of that genetic material compared to others, which tend to propagate less. So eventually the more propagating genes will win over all the others. Until even better propagating genes show up through mutations. It’s that simple, completely basic common sense really.
Self-replication is the defining characteristic of life, it’s what makes it so prevailing. Basically everything on the planet that can be converted into a living tissue gets converted eventually. Life would not be life if it did not do this.
Thinking of this as “incentives” and “goals” is just a way for us, humans, to visualize and better understand it, to sort of get a more intuitive understanding. Because that’s how our brains and consciousness operate.
If a living thing don’t pass its genes, then its genes don’t passes. Every genes today are there because they were passed. Genes that didn’t have to pass themselves as a goal dissapeared, because they didn’t passed to the future.
Those who pass on their genes (genes not life) survive, thus the genes that want to propagate themselves, propagate themselves.
It’s not a goal, there is no incentive, it’s just that viruses, bacteria, and life that doesn’t multiply doesn’t stick around on the planet. Evolution is not progressive.
the problem her is that we naturally use language that pretends that everything is working based on intent towards goals.
We say thinks like *”water seeks its own level”* or *”nature abhors a vacuum”* as if these things had feelings and plans and goals they were purposefully working towards.
This is not how it works at all, but it makes it easier picture things in our own heads.
Your DNA doesn’t have any goal or purpose, it is just a molecule doing chemistry. It no more or less has any agency than a piece of wood has any say about wether or not it wants to burn.
Chemistry just happens to it.
Your DNA and RNA is just molecules that under the right conditions make copies of themselves; a molecular pattern that self-replicates under the right conditions.
The copying process isn’t perfect and over time you end up with copies that produce more copies of themselves and version that produce less. In the end the copies which replicate the most and best will outnumber the other versions.
There is not wanting, no planing, no working towards a goal involved. Nothing with any more agency than a drop of water flowing down an incline.
This natural process without anything directing it will naturally end up producing molecules that will be best suited to producing more copies of itself.
One can describe that process as if it life was working towards some goal, because that is sort of what it looks like from a human perspective, but it is not what happens.
The idea that things and abstract concepts have goals and wants is the sort of thinking that leads small children to draw a smiley face on their painting of the sun. The sun is not a person and neither is evolution or DNA.
Humans think of everything around them as if it was acting with a purpose, because our brains are optimized to think about other humans who act with a purpose. Treating inanimate objects as if they were people is weird byproduct of that.
It’s not a goal or incentive. It’s just that the material that propagates spawns more material that continues to propagate. If something doesn’t propagate, it dies off. The better something propagates, the more it spreads.
* It’s basically what happens after a while.
* The things that randomly mutated to be good at passing their genes down, passed their genes down.
* And the things the randomly mutated to be bad at it didn’t.
* So after enough time, you’re mostly left with only things that are good at passing down genes.
* Sure every now and then something mutates and loses that ability, but by definition it doesn’t pass that bad trait on so it just disappears again.
It’s not, exactly. It’s only that the organisms you see nowadays when you look around are the descendants of organisms from the past that reproduced— and therefore genetically similar to them— and not the nonexistent-by-definition descendants of organisms that didn’t reproduce.
There could be genes that make organisms who aren’t incentivized to reproduce. On a one-generation-at-a-time level, genes crop up and spread pretty much at random. Whatever goals those organisms have, they pursue, and do a better or worse job at achieving. Good for them.
Their goal wasn’t to reproduce, though, so their genes won’t be carried by the next generation, unless they reproduced just by accident. The next generation will have more of the genes that make organisms that tend to have offspring, and less of the ones that makes organisms that don’t. Over time, the world ends up with almost exclusively genes that make organisms who are heavily motivated to reproduce.
>I was in another thread and someone made the comment “literally the only motivating force for any life is actually genetic material’s incentive to propagate itself.”
>And that got me thinking, “yeah, I obviously know that the ultimate end goal for an organism is passing on its genes… but why?” Why does that matter, or rather why is it a goal for genetic material to propagate and perpetuate itself? What is the “incentive” here and WHY is that an incentive?
There is no “incentive” as you might imagine it. It’s a simple selection process. Out of 2 otherwise identical organisms the one with the mutation for a higher drive for procreation will have more offspring, thus increasing the prevalence of that trait within the next generation. You could say that the need for procreation is an evolutionary advantage.
Physics. It has to. Just like a crystal, when certain forces and elements are present things have to happen. Nothing else can happen. Force water with heat and it boils. A physically forced event is at the very bottom of a long chain of forced events. These long chains of physical events combining elements are creation. DNA is nothing more that a rock made of elements forced together by irresitable physical law. A crystal has a short list of events and forces and it’s easy to see. A mountain has a longer, more complex list. The DNA of “life” has an even longer list but every single step is forced by the laws of physics.
The elements and the forces rule every cell absolutely. Those forces rule the organism. There is no choice. When you wake up in bed with some funky, smelly person you don’t like you can say…”I was forced into this.” It’s true.
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