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
I like to think of it like this:
Take a randomly formed molecule in a chemical soup; it will either cause a reproduction of itself or it won’t.
The reproductions with have the same two possible outcomes, and so on.
Eventually more complexity randomly occurs; the molecule will be more complex from picking up other randomly bumped into molecules that will either join together or just sit very closely together.
These more complex pairs or groups of molecules will either be more likely or less likely to generate copies than others. The versions of the groups more likely to generate copies also have more chances of randomly increasing complexity and either increasing or decrease the likelihood or making more copies.
The groups of molecules best at making more copies are what we consider life.
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