The Purpose Of Life

While “the meaning of life” might be a tough personal or philosophical question, life itself also has a rather clear natural purpose. As humans, we are an extension of the biological life on this planet. In this article, I would like to elaborate what this purpose is, and what it means as a possible direction for our species. This is not necessarily related to the meaning of our personal lives, but if you, personally, are struggling with this question, this might also offer you a very general direction outside of religion or esoterics.

If you know how DNA works, and how life probably began, please feel free to skim through following paragraph and the entire “What happened” chapter.

Unfortunately, I have to begin with an obligatory disclaimer: Evolution is not “just another theory”. It is a theory backed by thousands of years of breeding experiments resulting in modern livestock and fruiting plants as we know them; with hundreds of years of those experiments well documented. It is backed by Mendel’s experiments on peas, and it is backed by modern genetics which allows you to find out your ancestry using an online service and a cotton swab. We understand rather well how DNA works, how protein synthesis works, how mutations happen, and so on, and so forth. We don’t have a complete picture, so we can’t predict precisely what tweaking one particular gene will do, but it is not because the theory is not sound — it is because we are still learning the rules, and because our genes are a work of a multi-billion-year long chain of accidents.