The meaning of life occurred to me today. Or, if not THE meaning of life, the goal of life. To put it in a simple catchy, startling one liner, the goal of life is to cheat. Of course the true meaning is a little more detailed than that. But its a good catchy phrase if you don’t have time to read this 2000+ word article.
Ever since the first signs of life began on the planet, living things have tried to get an edge over one another. When single cellular, these organisms would grow and try to be the largest they could. At some point, these organisms realized that it was much easier for two of them to work together so they wouldn’t need to wait so long to get big. then three, four, on until we began to see simple multi-cellular organisms.
Once they had decided to start working together, each specializing in doing something specific for the whole community, these cells were vastly superior to single cellular organisms. The idea caught on, and soon many organisms had begun to make the switch to multi-cellular creatures.
The negative side of things however, was that a multi-cellular organism is far too large to derive much nutrition from consuming single cellular ones for very long. Thus we reach the second major leap; Photosynthesis. Less a way to take advantage of other life forms, this was more a way to survive their previous evolution that ended up robbing them of their food.
So, the most simple of plants were created. floating easily on the surface of the water, these plants could absorb sunlight and turn it into energy needed to survive. Later when land was reached, some of these primitive plants would begin to evolve to spread onto dry land.
All might have been peaceful, but there were still other multi-cellular and single cellular organisms that lagged behind these plants. In order to gain photosynthesis, the cellular structure was reworked in the plants, and it made them less able to defend themselves. The remaining tiny organisms took advantage of this new weakness and soon formed the first primitive animals, feeding off of the plants rather than producing their own food.
At the previous set, things probably could have balanced out. However, the laggards who hadn’t figured out how to produce their own supply of energy were now competing over each other for food. Violence would break out over food supplies with the purely larger organisms always winning. The smaller ones had no chance to survive…
Until they decided to play dirty. Being big was nice and all, but smaller organisms are faster. Soon would come a time where these multi-cellular organisms not only would race to become the biggest; but also the deadliest. Claws, teeth, pincers, beaks, animals began to develop ways to defend themselves; and attack others. A third tier opened up, carnivores that hunted other animals rather than trying to compete over the easier to catch but limited plants.
In these very primitive stages we ended up with three forms of life; the Plants that created food, the Herbivores that ate plants, and the Carnivores that ate other animals, incidentally keeping overpopulation from wiping out the Plants. Things were more or less in balance at this point, with plants and animals alike growing larger and spreading. The plants grew taller to get more energy and survive the damage from Herbivores. Herbivores grew larger to protect themselves from Carnivores, and the Carnivores grew to keep up with Herbivores.
A fourth category of organism began to develop as they began to fall behind. Creatures that were not large or strong enough to fight any of the larger animals. The desire to survive is one of the driving forces of both evolution and individual ingenuity. At some point, some of these animals realized that once a larger carnivore was done with it’s meal, or when another creature dropped dead on it’s own, there was a feast to be had.
Rather than fighting and working for their meals, this new group realized they could just follow carnivores and weakened herbivores in order to get a free meal. These creatures followed the example off all life before it and broke away from the accepted system with an easier way to survive.
Things continued much like this; largely everything attempted to grow and become stronger, Dinosaurs became the dominant species of the planet, as they had teeth, and claws to fight with, and did not waste energy on temperature regulation systems inside their body. Things may have continued like this almost indefinitely, but then something terrible happened.
Scientists are unsure what exactly; meteor is the favorite idea; but personally I figure just a standard ice age would have done the dinosaurs in just as easily. The cold blooded reptiles would almost entirely die out from freezing to death. I suppose that isn’t as dramatic as raining fire of death that conveniently killed the dinosaurs but left mammals almost entirely untouched.
Regardless, the next major plot point of history was coincidentally enough The Ice Age. Being cold blooded was no longer a good thing, and with food in limited supply now; neither was being large. The animals needed to change their game if they were going to survive the cooling climate. Most of the dinosaurs would become extinct on their way to his era as being a gigantic cold blooded creature that needed tons of food had no chance to survive. Other dinosaurs would begin to evolve so that they could warm themselves, or find warmer areas to live in.
This, was the age of the mid-sized, warm blooded mammal. Much smaller diets meant that they did not need to eat nearly as much, but they were at least large enough to defend themselves. Warm blood and fur would allow them to survive the cold weather, and forming packs with each other allowed them to more easily share warmth and survive cold nights.
At some point here, Humans entered the picture. It took evolution a few times to get it right as evidenced by the appearance of several different kinds of humans, with the old ones fading out soon after the new ones arrived. The human was practically King of Versatility. As though learning from all of the evolution all over the world, humans combined some of the most unique abilities. It is unlikely mankind was the first to get all of these abilities but rather the uniqueness was the combination of them.
First, mankind is Omnivorous, which means they could choose to eat plants or animals, doubling their diet compared to animals that were not. They also began developing opposable thumbs. Giving them the ability to hold and make simple tools. A claw hurt; but being stabbed with the sharpened end of a stick hurt a lot worse.
The biggest change was that of the mind. Whenever a creature finds it’s self in a situation where long-term survival is impossible, something in the animal seeks change, it tries to go outside the rules of it’s own body to solve the problem, and this takes an incredible amount of time. Somehow, the mind of the human developed so it would do this on the short term.
When faced with a problem, humans would come at it from all angles, trying everything they could get their hands on until they learned how to solve the problem best. While to us, these flailing movements might seem barbaric and devoid of thought, at that time, it was revolutionary.
I’m slower than that animal, but if I throw a rock at it, I can kill it without running after it. This thought, though not in so many words occurred to someone back then. Unlike other predators that had to chase after their prey, Man could save their energy by throwing a rock at a small animal.
Likewise, a similar thought occurred to them about larger animals. They could make weapons to fight larger animals with to get a LOT of food. Mankind could now do what took every other creature thousands of years of evolution to do. They could MAKE a solution to their problems. They could live in warm climates without fur, and take the fur of a larger animal when it was cold. They could kill animals of any size by working together, and they quickly became SO good at survival that they actually had to spent time figuring out how to keep themselves entertained while they weren’t busy.
But now lets go back to those pesky single cellular organisms. Nobody likes to lose, and no animal wants to die off. But what can these single cellular organisms do now? They were so tiny, larger animals could not even SEE them. They had probably been at least up to the age of dinosaurs fighting amongst each other as they had at the beginning. At some point though, they decided, just like every other creature had, that it was time to break some rules and move up in the food chain.
Taking advantage of their size, they could attack a larger creature from the inside and feed off of that animal indefinitely and the animal had absolutely no way to protect it’s self. That is, until those animals began to evolve back. Disease was a horrible plague back then, even a few hundred years ago, diseases that are a non-threat now were deadly.
Once disease had started to spread, the response from animals was to develop a way to fight invaders on the cellular level. Any animal that lacked these defenses would die from bacteria attacking them. Eventually, every animal had an immune system and began a side war between themselves and disease at all times.
It took humans an extremely long time to come up with a natural cure for disease, and were plagued on the same level as nearly every animal. This did not stop humanity from trying. Many primitive medical practices were invented to cure ailments, even if many did not work, or even killed the patient. It was a learn as you go art, and it would take a very long time to perfect.
Skipping forward a few thousand years, Humanity would become even better at survival, to the point that survival no longer took up a majority of time. Now, they could focus on surviving COMFORTABLY. Building permanent shelters, and renewable sources of food would be a goal of nearly all human tribes. With no real competition from other animals the only competition humans faced; were each other. Once the idea that land could be owned had come to their minds, so too came the idea that they must defend it.
While others got the idea that they could claim more. Human history is riddled with wars between developing tribes, then nations. Only recently have land disputes come down on a large scale. Though there are still smaller areas that fight on against each other for land.
But lets look at today. A lot of activities today mirror the evolutionary battle that lead to human dominance on the planet. Singular humans are almost incapable of surviving on their own, and have formed larger organisms of government to represent them all. Many different forms of these governments have been tried, and many have been scrapped. It is almost like primitive animals who formed from many single cells, and had to work at becoming animals that could compete with the others.
Of course unlike cells, humans keep an individual separation from the whole that allows them to recognize when things are going south and rise up to bring change rather than allowing the entire group to die.
The power of human beings exists though in their numbers. If you create any system that allows for large numbers of people to participate, there will come a time eventually when one person manages to break the system, or within the system’s rules find a way to make the system completely unbalanced in their favor.
Finding bugs in games that benefit you tends to give you a sense of accomplishment, and a good feeling, as though you’ve done something good, weather you decide to abuse it or not. Likewise finding a bug that hinders you is unnaturally upsetting. Its as though your core evolutionary urges recognize these events and are trying to steer you towards what is most beneficial for you.
As well, any mathematician can tell you what X means in the equation 4X(6+3)=180 within minutes because of their specialization. but enough people with only basic math skills could also solve it just by tossing random values into X until they find the value that works. Actually one person could do it by systematically guessing faster than a mathematician could because X is 5 so they’d get it on their fifth try.
Crime mirrors carnivores of old times as well; certain humans realized that it would be easier to take what they needed rather than work for it; while police would become the immune system of governments. Working to protect society from criminals, while criminals work to avoid the police.
Every motivation. Every evolution. Every THING that every living creature has ever done has been for one goal: to get an edge over their equals and superiors in order to make living easier. And humans have mastered it. We have reached a point where there is someone out there actively working to rid us of every even mild inconvenience in life, and its doubtful we will ever stop advancing our technology until we reach a point where we no longer need to expend any energy on survival at all I can only hope that by then we are smart enough to find something to spend our energy on to keep ourselves from becoming a race of blob people.