Life Origins

Once again, it’s time to start another perfectly reasonable, non-controversial topic: the origin of life. If we exclude the theological frameworks, mythic origin stories, and anthropocentric creation narratives, we’re still left with enough competing theories to make our heads spin. So why even bother talk about this topic on a website about human health?

Because as much as humans love to believe we’re special, we aren’t built from a particularly unique blueprint. While the external appearances and behaviors of different species are wildly diverse, the core functionality of life is pretty consistent. Everything alive follows the same metabolic rules. We all need energy, we all regulate internal environments, and we all mobilize entropy to momentarily experience life. Just using slightly different tactics.

And that’s where things get interesting. If we can trace back the evolutionary drivers of our core needs (movement toward value, avoidance of harm), we can start to decode where our emergent motivational wiring comes from. If you’ve been following Part I and II, you’ll know that almost all human behavior maps back to a few ancient drivers. Understanding those drivers through the lens of our evolutionary ancestors strips away a lot of mystery. And a lot of self-delusion.

Why this matters

We tend to think of ourselves as sitting at the top of some elaborate biological pyramid. But if you trace things back far enough, the lines between chemistry and biology start to blur. Where does life actually begin? When a lipid bubble forms? When metabolism kicks in? When replication starts? The further we zoom out, the more arbitrary our definitions start to look.

That’s the whole point of this section. To recalibrate how we understand life itself. Once we shift from seeing life as a miracle to seeing it as an emergent inevitability, we begin to drop the illusion of separateness. We are the unfolding of the same principles that generated mitochondria, microbes, mushrooms, and mammals.