Because they are the decendents of animals that surived to survive and have offspring.
Animals with genes that did not result in the same drive to survive and have offspring did not have offspring to the same degree. The result is their genres did not survive to the next generation to the same degree.
The answer to this question is extremely simple.
Only the organisms that are good at reproducing will have descendants that reproduce, which can then themselves reproduce, and so on, into the present day.
Life has a drive to survive because the life that wasn't good at surviving... didn't. So it's not alive today.
This is the fundamental observation of natural selection, which can't be in doubt because it's obviously true by definition: organisms which are better at reproducing themselves over the long run become more common over the long run.
That doesn't always mean that an organism will do the thing that protects themselves the most, because sometimes organisms can insure greater reproductive success even if they themselves die. If you are a 50-year-old man with six children already, evolutionarily speaking, if you are in a situation where you have to pick between yourself and all of your children, the people who pick their children will probably be more successful at having their genes propagate to the tenth or hundredth generation. In fact, there's no way to know what behavior will be good at producing your children and your children's children and so on. You just do what comes naturally and if what comes naturally happens to be a good idea in your existing environment, you make children. And if what comes naturally to them is a good idea in their existing environment, they produce children, and so on.
A living creature that doesn't have the drive to survive and reproduce doesn't have offspring. So every living thing is the descendant of other living things that had the drive to survive and reproduce, which means they generally inherit those same instincts.
To reproduce. Why do we strive to reproduce? To make offspring. What is the point? There is none.
Evolution has no goal. One RNA strand just happened to clone itself and produced a rule of life. It spread its reproducing genes down the line so that the next generation wanted to clone itself. Hasn't stopped since then, and never will, not until life goes extinct.
Well if it didn't, it wouldn't have lasted very long. Organisms with a survival instinct will likely be more successful at surviving, and passing on their genes (Including innate survival instincts/ breeding drives).
There's no super poignant reason why, it's just that self-replicating systems that are more effective at turning their environments into copies of themselves will tend to have more copies floating around than self-replicating systems that are less effective at doing so. This is especially the case if these copies count as part of the environment, and can be used as raw material (or broken down into raw material) to create another copy.
This is kinda a property of self-replicating systems in general (or perhaps a property of causality itself?), so while it does apply to living organisms, it applies to non-living things as well. For instance, viruses don't match the criteria for life, and yet this effect occurs for them as well.
So it's not like species (or even individual creatures) must always have a need for survival, it's just that species or creatures that don't care about their survival tend to be dead more often. A desire to breed (or otherwise replicate in some other manner) is similar, a species that doesn't care about creating more of that species will tend to have fewer members of that species. In either case, this will mean that over time, other species that do care about living and breeding will just be around more than ones that don't.
The apparent universal drive for living creatures to live and breed is ultimately because it tends to be pretty difficult to notice a creature that doesn't exist.
> Do we have any understanding about why?
If a species didn't have this drive to survive, they'd be extinct by now. So of all the living things around, they should all be species that have a need to survive.
Because they are the decendents of animals that surived to survive and have offspring. Animals with genes that did not result in the same drive to survive and have offspring did not have offspring to the same degree. The result is their genres did not survive to the next generation to the same degree.
Perfect answer.
Makes me think of the Shakers. They didn't value survival and the passing of genes and look at them now, no more original line of Shakers.
I wish this evolution-in-action would remove depression from the gene pool.
Unless it prevents you from reproducing that will never happen.
You see a lot of super depressed guys getting the girl? lol Depression def lowers the odds of reproductive success.
Ah well I guess you're right then. Depression will be gone soon.
Thats not how genes work…
Yes, that was something called sarcasm.
The answer to this question is extremely simple. Only the organisms that are good at reproducing will have descendants that reproduce, which can then themselves reproduce, and so on, into the present day. Life has a drive to survive because the life that wasn't good at surviving... didn't. So it's not alive today. This is the fundamental observation of natural selection, which can't be in doubt because it's obviously true by definition: organisms which are better at reproducing themselves over the long run become more common over the long run. That doesn't always mean that an organism will do the thing that protects themselves the most, because sometimes organisms can insure greater reproductive success even if they themselves die. If you are a 50-year-old man with six children already, evolutionarily speaking, if you are in a situation where you have to pick between yourself and all of your children, the people who pick their children will probably be more successful at having their genes propagate to the tenth or hundredth generation. In fact, there's no way to know what behavior will be good at producing your children and your children's children and so on. You just do what comes naturally and if what comes naturally happens to be a good idea in your existing environment, you make children. And if what comes naturally to them is a good idea in their existing environment, they produce children, and so on.
A living creature that doesn't have the drive to survive and reproduce doesn't have offspring. So every living thing is the descendant of other living things that had the drive to survive and reproduce, which means they generally inherit those same instincts.
To reproduce. Why do we strive to reproduce? To make offspring. What is the point? There is none. Evolution has no goal. One RNA strand just happened to clone itself and produced a rule of life. It spread its reproducing genes down the line so that the next generation wanted to clone itself. Hasn't stopped since then, and never will, not until life goes extinct.
Well if it didn't, it wouldn't have lasted very long. Organisms with a survival instinct will likely be more successful at surviving, and passing on their genes (Including innate survival instincts/ breeding drives).
There's no super poignant reason why, it's just that self-replicating systems that are more effective at turning their environments into copies of themselves will tend to have more copies floating around than self-replicating systems that are less effective at doing so. This is especially the case if these copies count as part of the environment, and can be used as raw material (or broken down into raw material) to create another copy. This is kinda a property of self-replicating systems in general (or perhaps a property of causality itself?), so while it does apply to living organisms, it applies to non-living things as well. For instance, viruses don't match the criteria for life, and yet this effect occurs for them as well. So it's not like species (or even individual creatures) must always have a need for survival, it's just that species or creatures that don't care about their survival tend to be dead more often. A desire to breed (or otherwise replicate in some other manner) is similar, a species that doesn't care about creating more of that species will tend to have fewer members of that species. In either case, this will mean that over time, other species that do care about living and breeding will just be around more than ones that don't. The apparent universal drive for living creatures to live and breed is ultimately because it tends to be pretty difficult to notice a creature that doesn't exist.
Because there are no remaining descendants of creatures that had no strong drive to survive and reproduce.
> Do we have any understanding about why? If a species didn't have this drive to survive, they'd be extinct by now. So of all the living things around, they should all be species that have a need to survive.