Origins of life

The endeavor to trace the origins of life seems to be an unending displacement of scientific focus. If the first forms of life came to be through a simple sequence of chemical reactions sparked by rocks, what explains the origin of these very "first" matters?

Survive

What kindles the inexorable desire in life forms to survive?

Phonological development

How does a child learn to distinguish an utterance from all other sounds? And what motivates this phonological development?

After language

If human communication had to evolve from pointing, iconic gestures of pantomiming to language, then is it not likely that the future will see more sophisticated cultural artifacts that complement or usurp the current forms? What would these new forms of symbolic vehicles, whose semantic content ought to be much richer than that enabled by any current linguistic conventions, look like?

Evolution and morality

If much of what is in our biological machinery today is because they primarily helped us survive and reproduce over evolutionary time, then I wonder what is left of morality.

Machiavellian intelligence

According to Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, humans are selected to outsmart each other so that other members' strategic goals and plans could be figured out, and complex social relationships could be navigated.
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Taste

What evolutionary function does the mechanism of taste serve? Often, I am misled by its semantic colorizing of consumables.