If you had been quietly observing Earth around the time when life got started, you would have noticed a dramatic change in goal-oriented behavior. Whereas earlier, the particles seemed as though they were trying to increase average messiness in various ways, these newly ubiquitous self-copying patterns seemed to have a different goal: not dissipation but replication. Charles Darwin elegantly explained why: since the most efficient copiers outcompete and dominate the others, before long any random life form you look at will be highly optimized for the goal of replication.
