Wondering about plants

dusty1

Soylent Green Is People

The "purpose" of any living thing (whether it be plants, bacteria, mosquitoes, dogs, or humans) is to reproduce in order to allow the species to live on to the next generation.

Most of the things a living organism does is for the purpose of living long enough to be able to pass its genetic material to create the next generation of that organism, which will live in order to do them same -- and so on, and so on.

edit on 4/7/2014 by Soylent Green Is People because: (no reason given)

Is there a purpose?

I thought it was all random time & chance.

Why would organisms "want" to survive?

There is no conscious purpose. The phenomenon of a lumps of material replicating itself into a similar lump of material (i.e., what we call a life process) is just what happened in nature by chance.

I don't know how it first happened, but once the first lumps of material randomly mixed together in such a way that (by chance) that combination of materials began to self-replicate by using the raw materials around it, then that self-replication (by definition of "self-replication") began a chain reaction of life that would not stop.

I can use the word "purpose" loosely here by saying that the purpose of this mechanism of nature was simply to replicate (reproduce), however, there is no consciousness behind this mechanism of nature -- just natural processes and physics.