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
Life itself is the ability of reproduction and procreation.
Why are omelets made of eggs? Because omelets are, by definition, made of eggs.
Why do we go to the doctor’s office to see the doctor? Because that’s what the doctor’s office is for.
Why does life pass on genes? Because life is the process of passing on genes.
For a less ELi5 approach, everything biological is chemical. Every movement and thought pattern and cell function is all driven by chemical reactions. At some point in the far far past, there were conditions that allowed for some chemicals to start this off: little processes that repeated.
Life reproduces because reproduction is what life is. The chemical processes that are favored by physics and chemistry all lined up so that our brains are wired to do what’s best in order to do what it’s always done: reproduce.
If you start with a bunch of random organic chains, and some do reproduce and some do not, in time, the ones that are reproducing will out number the ones that are not and keep on dong what they are doing. No “reason” is required.
I can explain it for you in three words: “what survives, survives.”
It’s not an incentive. Just a logical process.
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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