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.
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