Law of Life

This article is about an evolutionary idea. For short story written byJack London,seeThe Law of Life.

TheLaw of Lifeis a term coined byauthorFarley Mowatin his 1952 bookPeople of the Deer,and popularized byDaniel Quinn,to denote a universal system of variousnatural principles,any of which tend to best fosterlife—in other words, any of which best guides behavior that tends toward thereproductive successand survival of some particulargene pool.The idea posits that, in general, the mostfitorganismsinstinctively behaveaccording to some natural rule (often, these rules vary among and are specific to thespecies). Sinceeveryorganism has some instinctive "law" it can follow to be the most reproductively successful, this very notion is a sort of law itself, true of all living beings: thus, the Law of Life.

In his 1996novel,The Story of B,Quinn writes, "A biologist would probably say what I'm calling the Law of Life is just a collection ofevolutionarily stable strategies— the universal set of such strategies, in fact. "

Quinn points out that this is aphysical law,likegravity,not acommandmentlike "thou shalt not kill" nor a legislative ruling like "pay taxes". As he puts it, the latter two are written where only man can read them (in books), and that they can be changed by a vote, while the Law of Life is written in the fabric of the universe and cannot be broken. Those who do not follow the law simply won't live.