Through trial and error, DNA’s descendants got really, really good at making babies.
A crucial key of a cell’s replication was it’s ability to fix its own internal errors before moving on. Cells and DNA are not only self-replicating, but self-repairing. A cell must get its own house in order before it is in any condition to go conquer the world or obtain any more power. If it has damaged, missing, or disordered organelles or nucleotides, it gets sick and can’t replicate.
At it’s core, each single cell requires homeostasis. Early life forms evolved to first have their own molecules in balance, before they could go light up the world.
And they did.
Life spread everywhere. The pattern of self-repair that DNA started became the way of all life and the evolutionary mandate.
Be healthy and in near-perfect stable order, or you will die. (Okay, so you’ll die anyways, but if you’re healthy, you get to make babies first.)
DNA is a freaking pro. The worst replication error rate we have found in human DNA is only 1 error out of 100 nucleotides, and it can be as little as 1 in 1 billion.[1]
To survive the chaos, nature kept busy all these years evolving backup plans and redundancies to get the entire organism stabilized if something was off. It wasn’t only DNA that had to self-balance. It was every living thing scaled on it.
Every cell has to figure out how to repair damage. Every tissue has to figure out how to heal. Every organ and system and organism spent 3 billion years of life and death becoming what many doctors call “self-healing organisms.”
Homeostasis-finders.
Balance-keepers.
Chaos/Order balancers.
With every warm-blooded mammal, an impossibly complex interconnection of hormones, trip sensors, temperature regulators and balancing mechanisms like cochlea and growth hormones and brain-muscle synaptic patterns and oxygen-based heart rate response systems and blood clotting chemicals.
Life is balance built on top of balance on top of balance.
And why wouldn’t it be? Every generation was just another contest with chaos – a slug fest of back and forth shots.
If order didn’t adapt to the punches that the random chaotic environments of nature threw at it, we would have all been extinct a long time ago. The wild earth was too difficult of a puzzle to solve, because there are millions of different ways to die in the wild. She was a contestant that would not be easily beaten. That’s why 99.9% of all species in history are currently extinct. The winners were only those with the utmost amount of balance that creates the utmost amount of adaptation.
All of us live constantly on the thin skin of where chaos and order meet. We are all Goldilocks creatures, with built in mechanisms and inner systems that challenge our own systems–
– like coevolving left and right brain hemispheres, coevolving adrenaline and noradrenaline, or coevolving sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
Homeostasis was the only way we could consistently defeat the chaos.
And with every success, we Ordered ones made our way and ventured out to gain more power – only to meet more chaos.
[1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-mutation-409/
