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
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.
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