> Well, yeah, I understand that's the reason why they continue to exist, but I'm wondering why nature would give organisms that instinct in the first place, why it would make them -want- to survive and reproduce. Life could have just as easily existed for a generation and then died out, and I'm trying to figure out why it didn't.
>
> -Eric Sleator
> Tue 18 Jun A.D. 2002

Life, in many many forms, *did* exist for a generation and die out. Or for several generation, or even hundreds, and then die out. Back when some kind of primordial bunch of stuff was inventing the concept of "life", there was *plenty* of it that didn't last. It's just that we're on the continuum of species that did. Nature didn't say "OK, I want you guys here to survive, so you can have THESE attributes, and those guys over there don't." That's religion, not science. The ones whose attributes were better for survival, survived. And now here we are, capable of asking why it was *us* and not some other bunch of stuff.

Maybe you're approaching this from an over-simplified view of evolution, that there was one particular moment when life started up out of nothing, then it turned into something else, which turned into something else, all the way through to us. This view is unfortunately perpetuated by a lot of iconic imagery about evolution, such as the famous little line of guys walking across from left to right, lizard to monkey to hominid to guy in a suit, or the evolutionary "tree" with current species pictured as the tidy end result of each branch. This isn't what evolutionary science currently believes. Life is *still* starting up and still evolving. Both then and now, the majority will probably *not* be long-term successes, for one reason or another.

Again, when I say "long-term successes", this can be over-simplified. The dinosaurs were long-term successes. Humans have been around for a blink of an eye compared to how long the dinosaurs were here.

Brunnen-"got a bit off the topic there"G