What Drives This Life

What drives the stuff of life to persist and thrive?
What drives it to struggle so hard 
to be fittest to compete and survive?
What drives it to be the most fecund 
and best at seeding the next generation
and generations after that?

What drives a life to live in toxic acidic hot springs
in deserts and icy tundra where conditions are extremely bad?
Where survival is always on the edge.
Life on earth can be found in every nook and cranny.
On the highest mountain top, in the deepest ocean trench.
In all the best and worst places.
If earth's life was leaked onto Mars it would probably take over.
Why is life so determined and persistent? What drives it?

If you sterilise an agar plate, 
it will remain free of life, while the dish is covered.
But, if you lift the lid, living things will quickly
move in, all kinds of living things competing for the tiny space.
Soon the plate will be covered with bacteria and fungi.
Life there will become ever more dense and species-rich.
The question is why? What drives this life?

Life is selfishness personified. 
Life is selfish for it fights for its own survival, competing against all others.
Life is selfish for it drives its own reproduction hard, competing against all others
It must survive, thrive and reproduce in abundance to sustain its on-going survival and existence.
The question is why? What drives this life to selfish survival and existence winning against all others?

Some says life is simply chemical reactions driven by potential energy.
Chemical reactions are obligatory, 
if the opportunity exits and the potential energy is there, the reaction will occur. 
Newly forged iron rusts, wet concrete sets, like abiotic reactions but, full of life.
Life is essentially set of a chemical chain reactions that perpetuates itself
driven by negative entropy. 
Life harvests energy to build structure and fight entropy and the inevitable decay to
disorganization.
A seed uses stored energy to grow roots and to pop its first leaves into the sunshine.
Then it uses photosynthesis and solar energy to build its leaves and stems. 
It burns energy to fight entropy trying to pull it down.
Add water to a seed and its organic chemical processes are triggered. Its growth is per-programmed and obligatory.

Why is the drive of life just chemistry?
Viruses are not alive, they are not living things. 
They are just bags of organic chemicals, proteins DNA, mRNA.
Enclosed in a membrane studded with spike proteins to help them get injected into living cells.
Viruses cannot survive alone by themselves, they must invade living cells to take over them like a parasite.
They take over the reproductive processes of the host cells to make copies of themselves, to invade other cells.
The chemistry of viruses gets better through natural selection.
The better their chemistry, the more infectious and more fecund they are, and the better their chance of survival.
What drives a virus? It's simply very advanced organic chemistry for parasites.
Viruses are like seeds, but they are not alive, not living things.

So in simple terms life is complex organic chemistry driven simply by potential energy.
Once the chemical processes of life are triggered they are obligatory.
Natural selection of the fittest continually refines the models in the showroom, like cars.
Natural selection also sees the ongoing development of new models to give them a go. 
Off-road, 4-wheel drive, hybrid, solar, hydrogen - you name it, they are all being developed and upgraded. 
This is how life progresses, using chemistry to drive its survival, development and fecundity.

Copyright © John Anderson | Year Posted 2021

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