Strange–my Google search for the word “life” turns up as its first hits a movie, a magazine, and two definitions, neither of which are “plants and animals.”
So you are watching the evening news, and they crew is interviewing someone who won a $500,000,000 lottery last week. Do you think to yourself “wow, out of the billions of people in the world, what are the chances of their interviewing the one who just won the lottery!”?
Life is like that–oddly, out of the trillions upon trillions of planets in the universe, life evolves only on the planets with the right conditions for life to evolve. You are boggling about the lottery winner getting attention after they won the lottery.
Good question. Every religious writing I’ve ever seen about God would seem to suggest so—a sense of right and wrong, for starters.
That fiendish Google! Customizing our searches again.
And all this life existing in the relative thickness of a coat of paint on a rubber ball too—from the bottoms of the ocean to the troposphere. What are the odds?
The odds are good enough that it happened at least once that we know if in this solar system. So greater than zero.
1:1
But a sense of right and wrong are not foundations of life. And if they are foundations of God, then why not worship those?
Maybe we should. But right and wrong also have utilitarian dimensions. What may be right for me—killing an enemy for example—would definitely not be good for my enemy. Religions do tend to try to codify what is right and what is wrong, nonetheless. In nature, what is right or wrong often depends on where in the food chain you happen to reside.
Does science have much to say about why life began in the first place? Not so much how, or how evolution changes things, but why? I don’t know that religion provides a very good answer either, but I believe this has always been a blind spot for science.
Depends on what you mean exactly when you say “Why”, but there is some thought that life exists for the purpose of increasing entropy.
I found this article, but it was not the one I was really looking for, about how it is hypothesized that life began in order to turn carbon dioxide into methane, which would increase the entropy of the system.
This is not fully accepted by a consensus, but the view is gaining popularity. Life does in fact increase entropy far more than a sterile ball of rock does.
One thing for sure, though. Whenever science says, “I don’t know (yet)”, you can be sure someone will come along and claim, “Because: God!”
That is not the right way to see it. The fact that life increases entropy is what allows it to exist, there is no purpose to it. But the existence of that niche - where something could be speeding up entropy using a mechanism to do it - means that over an infinite timespan and infinite number of tries in a chaotic enough environment, something could get randomly assembled that will then copy itself endlessly and occupy that niche.
Interesting. We’re really just small components in a great chemical reaction from that perspective.
This is a case for where two words are intertangled. How? The laws of physics permitted it when the conditions were right. Why? The laws of physics permitted it when the conditions were right.
You seem to be again making a mistake of definitions–everything happens for a reason, but not everything happens for a purpose.
But life does increase entropy more than no life does. Earth gives off higher entropy electromagnetic radiation than would be reflected off of an empty rock. This is due to life.
Just as the a Rayleigh–Taylor instability develops complexity in the interface between two different fluids to increase the rate of mixing, life gets involved in those complex processes and speeds up the breakdown of differences between two states.
You can look at it as asking, what is the purpose of the complexity of an R-T instability? It may be an emergent phenomenon due to the mixing of differing fluids, but it is also a phenomenon that increases that mixing. Without it, if differing fluids just diffused along their point of contact, it would take far longer to achieve full mixing.
And if it can be shown that early life did originate in these strata that chemically hydrolyzed co[sub]2[/sub] into methane, then it can be said that that is indeed the right way to see it.
Life exists because it can. “Life” has no motivation. No entity is granted de facto preference over any other entity. A living thing will eat any other living thing if it can. A typhoid-XDR pandemic could, theoretically, wipe out all of humanity and rest its metaphorical foot on humanity’s metaphorical corpse and that would be that (though, in all likelihood, the pandemic will probably kill less than a third of us).
We are not special in the grand scheme of things, beyond the fact that we are capable of abstract reasoning. Perhaps when we are evolved to the state of humans depicted in Vonnegut’s Galapagos, there will be a new dominant Earth species – probably some descendant of the corvidae family. And “god”/“life” will go on, not caring, as is the case today.
That’s not really a scientific question.
As my friend’s father used to say, why is a crooked letter. Why must there be a why?
If you get a self replicating molecule that can replicate with errors, you are on the path. The “how” question is interesting, but not the why. Why is that rock there? Why did that weed grow in one place rather than another. Often there is no why.
So what is the reason Life emerged at all, apart from the carbon dioxide thing?