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, 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.
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