You’re in a spacious room, alone, no one beside you. In fact, loneliness is inexistent because the “other” doesn’t exist, yet. You’re anxious and afraid, and there’s plenty of food in the room. The panicking in fact comes from that moldy-cracked wooden door, trembling in the corner on its hinges and deadbolt. You know that, at any moment, you can die, because those excited zombies are coming for your precious brain, and not for the pile of food. The only thing you know about the outside world is your imminent death. Your feeling of doom is getting worse, and you’re starting to feel numb and as if your “soul is exiting your body”. Rapidly, you succumb to your bodily responses and lose consciousness. When you wake up, you become speechless to the sight of an entity looking and behaving  just like you, even though you don’t know how    you behaved or how you   looked like. Regardless of the latter fact, the ‘You’s  didn’t feel any safer, but always terrified. Now hungry. And then, briskly, the door popped inward, and three zombies rushed towards you.

At their furious run, you stood stupefied. When they jumped over either one of you, you started doing anything you can to survive. One of you strangled a zombie to death, the miserable other was fighting two dead. The struggling duplicate suddenly found his hand grip on a rolling, sharp, solid carrot. Without thinking a lot, you stabbed the post-mortals cruelly and repeatedly until you were able to break free and hurl outside past the door. Like the other ‘You’ did. Of note, you didn’t mind his insensitivity, at all. Always latching on the carrot, you felt powerful. Gazing into the horizon, you saw separate herds of zombies coming towards you. To the same sight, you find your duplicate panicking on the floor, losing consciousness and then splitting into two; and as he wakes up, he and his duplicate rush to the room, eat, and then this weird cycle of duplication repeats.

As the days went by, the fear and anxiety became habitual feelings.  Many duplicates sprouted; many failed to defeat the zombies. The originals taught their skills only to their duplicates. Potatoes were better for distance; carrots remained the basic. Some  learned to use both, and indeed, they survived. The replicas who explored the outside forest found sticks and stones to be efficient. As months went by, tools started to become even more complex and powerful. Interestingly, two species of duplicates arose: forest-users and their predecessors, food-users. Food-users, although the most primitive, still survived and flourished in the room. The forest-users evolved and discovered cooperation in the end, which, ultimately, protected them from zombies.

This is a comprehensive depiction of Life and its struggle to persist in Nature. Reproduction, which is energy consuming, came, by itself, as a tool  and as a persistent solution. It gave Life infinite chances to err and retry. And whomever survived longest till duplication, got to be selected by Nature.