purpose of survival?

Question

there is no biological reason as to why we should or must survive. why is there such thing as survival of the fittest if entropy eventually catches up. give me one good answer as to why life is built for survival. my opinion is that there is no reason for survival when looked at from a scientific perspective, but i am a religious person, so i have reason for my survival. what is the point of survival???
you tell me. any abusive or idiodic replies will be reported

larry j your answer is pointless

worried person, i see that you have filled in some gaps in the question i have asked. but there are problems, ie you say that these organisms "want" implying these life forms had a choice in their progression i dont think biology has ever wanted, i think it just does as programmed. Also rules of biology have shown that life only comes from life abiogenesis has never occured in the eyes of a human.. we have never witnessed it unless it was under controlled circumstances eg human intervention.... and i was told that nothing in nature is random except radiation. everything else is precise and specific.
random processes of molecules doesnt answer the question as to why something would just keep on doing what it does and then randomly "create" a survival mechanism for the sake of it.
life and survival is a pointless effect unless a higher force is in the works.
survival shouldnt have occured. can you please elaborate on the way that these random proccesses occured. or how the end

or how the end resulted in a self sustaining "SURVIVING" organism more complex then any other machine in the known universe?

btw could you explain to me also the reason as to why these molecules can reproduce and how they do so?
molecular biology is a very interesting topic. funny how the only source i seem to find about molecular reproduction seems to be about biology :-S

the miller-urey experiment produced 85% tar, 13% carbolic acid, 1.05% glycine, 0.85% alanine, and trace amounts of other chemicals.

a couple of amino acids isnt a protein.
or life for that matter.... you can try and blow holes in this argument all you like but you and i both know that we are nowhere near the answer about how, when, where or why life occured in the 1st place, also chaos is not random... if you know about the butterfly effect, you should know that chaos is deterministic.
ie fluid dynamics, fractal patterns, and population growth.
i have spoken to some very knowledgeable people and they all admit that i have a good argument when it comes to the origin of life.... but evolution is provable, and this is why i accept it. be a seeker of the truth, not blinded by the presumption that there shouldn't be design in the universe. it is evident to me. but until you truely prove me wrong (you cannot prove a negative) i will continue to believe as according

btw, thank you for that intellectual joust. its not often i get to talk with someone who can understand the things i wonder about these days :-(

life is complicated lets leave it at that either way.

Answer 1

you hinted at the answer when you mentioned being "religious"; its for your eternal soul and for that of others. what you do on Earth will affect how you spend eternity.

But come to think of it, from a scientific point of view there isnt really a reason to survive.

Answer 2

Evolution has no purpose - it's just a description of population genetics over time - what we see are certain individuals surviving more than others because of their genetic predisposition - and what do they do after they survive that means anything to population genetics? They reproduce and pass along those lucky genes that allowed them to survive. When the environment changes and those genes no longer confer an advantage, other individuals in the population will survive better and reproduce more. Individuals do not evolve. Evolution is a population-level event - surviving is nothing unless the individual can get their genes fixed within a population. So surviving means nothing without reproduction.

Answer 3

Perhaps life exist potentially in everything if that would be true. Then life exist because that what does exist contains life and it would then not be possible for life not to be either present or potentially possible. However, if you mean why do we need to survive then evolution would tell us that survival is necessary to continue our existence into the future. Does that mean the future holds the answers....I also believe that life exist to sustain other forms of life which perhaps sustain ecosystems, planets, stars as our existence changes chemicals on our planet which in turn change well that s a good question. So if survival exist to promote not only our life but LIFE in general then one could say that if survival is intertwined with existence and if existence is intertwined with the universe then we survive because existence is in part survival....Thus we survive because we exist in the absence of existence there is no need to survive. Just my two cents...NO SOURCE this is from me which when you think about it makes more sense than sourcing someone else who in turn would have to source someone else ETC until someONE actually had something to say ;)

Answer 4

well if people didn't have the will to survive then they wouldn't be a human race. We all have a purpose in life so we need to live to fulfill it. Also no one wants to suffer so try to keep yourself from that by surviving.

Answer 5

Yes, I don't see any "purpose" either, but, there is a reason why living things a built to survive.

Living things are complex chemical reactions. During Earth's infancy, through random interactions of chemicals (Earth was hot and active), some molecules turned out to be able to reproduce themselves. This was random, through chemical reactions.

Now if you have a molecule which can reproduce, it will multiply. These are just complex chemical reactions. Through MORE random interactions, MORE complex molecules resulted and eventually living cells were about. Since these can reproduce, they were also successful. These cells eventually evolved into multicellular organisms, and that si you and me.

Now this is the important part. There is no "purpose" why living things constantly try to survive and reproduce. But there is a REASON. The reason is that through random chemical reacions over millions of years, the only complex organisms that survived were the ones who tried to survive. The only ones that are around are the ones that reproduce.

The thing is, there is no purpose, it is simply because the ones that want to survive are the ones that survive, so they are the ones that you see. There is also no "purpose" to reproduction, the reason why we all reproduce is because the only animals which go on to reproduce are the ones which can reproduce!

I hope you can see my perspective.
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RESPONSE to deep thought v2.0 be..'s further edits:
You are right, by "want" I do mean "programmed".
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Whether random events in nature exists or not, is very hard to answer. For example, quantum theory conflicted with Einstein's beliefs. To einstein, the universe was very predictable, and given enough information about the present(the velocity and position of every single particle in the universe) you could predict the future. But according to the Uncertainty principle you cannot measure both the velocity and position of any particle, therefore you cannot predict the future.

Anyway, whether the universe is random or predictable, life exists and it does anything to survive and reproduce.

Someone called Stanley Miller did an experiment where he mixed hydrogen, water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide. He then zapped the mixture with electrical sparks.

The mixture was transparent but after 10 minutes a brown goo substance was formed. The brown goo turned out to be a bunch of complex organic molecules.

What the experiment did was simulate the Earth billions of years ago when life was only just forming. The electrical sparks were to simulate lightning and the chemicals were equivalent to the chemicals of Earth billions of years ago.

The complex molecules I talk about are simply molecules which were able to make copies of themselves. This happened by "accident". Only the best adapted, best surviving and most efficient ones survived. As more "accidents" occured these molecules grew into better molecules, and eventually life(I am not so sure how that transition happened, and I don't think anyone does). Many ineffective cells died and only the best ones survived. Only the ones that were programmed to survive survived.

Through more mutations, which are "random", these simple cells eventually evolved into more complex orgamismms and eventually into multicellular organisms.

The first replicating molecules replicated because, well, they just did. Unless you believe in a god, in which case you could argue that god made these "random" events occur and they were not really random.

PS

About everything in nature being precise. Nature is chaotic, and by chaotic I don't mean unpredictable but what happens is extremely sensitive to the smallest events. For example, the butterfly effect. Could a butterfly cause a tornado? Apparently it can, since the butterfly causes something which causes something else which causes something else...you get it.

Ok, since the smallest thing can make a big difference, random radiation could cause massive changes. There is radiation everywhere, and radiation can make life mutate, and mutations cause evolution.

So, if mutations are random then we all came to be through random events.

PPS

You also asked why a survival mechanism would be created just for the sake of it. The thing is, since all these muations are random, there have also been mechanisms which focused on not surviving, or not eating, or to be suicidal. Mutations are most likely to be bad mutations, but sometimes they turn out to be good and these good mutations eventually build surviving mechanisms.

The thing is, that we have not only had surviving mechanisms but all sorts, "randomly". The only reason the survival ones are most common is because they are the ones which lasted, since you cannot reproduce if you kill yourself. We are still seeing bad mutations. We have now eveolved so far that we are intelligent enough to inherit technology and make more of it, therefore we can even genetically modify ourselves, and it doesn't have to be just for the next generation, for example, somatic genetic engineering which can mean maybe in the future you can modify your genes so you are better good looking(hehe).

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Further response
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I never said chaos is random, I just said that it is hard to predict since the smallest bit of input can produce big changes.

By the way, even if it seems that way I am not totally against there being a design in the universe. If radiation is random, maybe it is a higher being who controls it, and maybe it doesn't "just happen"? Maybe this is how life is designed, by the use of deliberate mutations. Anyway those are just some thoughts. Oh and thank you too for making me wonder about the cosmos...

Answer 6

The purpose of survival is in the answer of why do we exist.

Answer 7

Being an idiot isn't a crime.


And your logic is false.