BioPurpose

by m.a.

You are biologically drawn to competency and innovation because of the technology you were serendipitously born into. Its motivations can empirically be categorized as life’s premeditated communications - co-governing impulses alongside natural judgements you make with the authority you were biologically given. 

There is no more illustrative example of this than the first impulse you ever had. Your system of self is loaded with features, but all of them rely on an initial impetus that you share with the entire spawn of life; acting as a voiceless liaison between nature’s systems and your own in all its members. Upon waking to the world, your body immediately speaks in one of the great universal languages, an interface for the ages that is used by all creatures at all stations of existence - the first language you speak is one of needs. 

Across almost every level of the biosphere, the creatures that inhabit their native dimensions are only a jaunt away from the resource they require to thrive in their respective settings. This resource, essentially in all cases, grows right beside them. Life not only sustains a years-long effort to grow the genome of the resource, but its systems have become apt at placing those resources next to a set of corresponding genotypes that need it to live. Life then simultaneously gives one of them the faculties to seek out the other, and pivotally, rewards the search with strength to fuel the next jaunt towards more resources. After these resources are consumed, the ground gets a reward for hosting the process. This is the interdimensional circle of nature’s design that keeps all of life in a state of continuous improvement, withstanding even death and birth. Naturally, the human somatic system fits into this one like it was made for it. 

To take part, the human is given a set of biological instructions that result in gathering and replanting those resources. These familiar guides are mirrored in the somatic systems of others in the same resource dimensions as well, and are more or less the same for all of us. The human, like its wild counterparts, seeks out nutrients automatically after a biological impetus has been met. This impetus is hunger, and when its messages become urgent enough, it drives our systemology to work in concert. Hunger is an entire paragraph spoken in the language of needs, hearing its every word is an instinctive experience for everyone. In these hunger-driven flow states, we are known to memorize territory and terrain, distance and expenditure between nutrient sources, threats along our path, and other tangible benefits of various efforts towards reward. 

These instructions are built into the human system as our original communicability between the earth and ourselves; put another way, they are life’s support communication for the child it birthed. Both what your body does in response to your needs and the impulses you experience that denote them play vital roles in perpetuating the cycle of life that continues to support you and all others in the grand procession. Your needs are not inhibitors to your well-being, obstacles to topple over, or points of future innovation to usurp, but actually connective ports to a nutritional system. When sought out, acquisition of these resources and their induction into your personal systemology make the garden more palatable to future lifeforms, yours included. This provides a tangible benefit to the system using your inherent function. The backbone of this agreement between all parties is that to maintain position, all creatures are required to reach out their hand and meet their own needs. Nature’s proposition in return is that this will create a better garden with each passing year for the ontology of everyone involved. 

This needs-based system is no less a technology than any other in the planetary suite, and one whose precepts will remain relevant to any biological organism that continues to exist. To date, we have never observed a system more capable of connecting dimensions of these sizes while each member maintains such a profound incognition of their neighbors. After performing a perfect dance for centuries beside and atop each other, many members of the eco tree will still be unaware of who’s hands they trade with for their vital resources. ‘Needs’ is tethering stations of life that would otherwise never commerce due to barriers of speech pattern, relative size, locality, nervous system speed, and cognition. 

Without an additional overarching purpose, the way that you are is evidence that nature devised you for something. It is not evidence that you are for some grander purpose than what is inherent to your biology. Rather, if you really need to put your finger on it, your biology is more probably evidence of your grander purpose. With some certainty, using only biological constructs, we can imagine ourselves quite well equipped to be cultivators and survivors in simultaneous fashion; one that seems to be the use case for every one of nature’s other technologies.