Member-only story
Purpose may be an emergent property of life
Teleology returns to biology
The closest to an immortal being is the gene, the unit of information that encodes life.
The old maxim about how life achieves this miracle is survival of the fittest. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, introduced in 1859 in his magnum opus The Origin of Species, introduced this concept in its 5th edition in 1869.
Darwin’s work made it unclear why species would seek to cooperate and look after one another when it was not in their survival interest. Unfortunately, this idea led to the erroneous conclusion that the most successful people are the fittest and should not look after “less fit” people. Late 19th—and early 20th-century ideologies twisted Darwin’s ideas to promote eugenics.
Neo-Darwinism, which centered evolution not around species but individual genes, carried over the concept of survival of the fittest but applied to individual genes. Biologist and noted Atheist Richard Dawkins made this concept famous with his book The Selfish Gene.
Thus, genes that encode for altruism are selfish in that they attempt to help copies of themselves within other members of the same species (or even other species) to better survive.
