David Toomey

“Play gives us a hint not of the nature of all nature, but perhaps much of it. Although we can't say for certainty what play is, we can say what it is like. It is like natural selection. Both play and natural selection are purposeless, ongoing, open-ended, and at any given stage, provisional. In the short term, both are wasteful and profligate, even to the point of extravagance. Both experiment, producing many outcomes that are useless, or detrimental, but producing a few that in time prove beneficial and necessary. Both bring order from disorder, establishing basic patterns that are reshaped and reused, but seldom discarded completely. Both create beauty. Both hold forces of competition and cooperation in a dynamic equilibrium. Both employ deception, and both can operate without a material form.

To many biologists, the best definition of life is that which evolves by natural selection. Since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may, with some justification, maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful. The resemblance is not perfect. In one significant way natural selection and play are dissimilar: natural selection occurs over vast timespans, and so is largely invisible, whereas play is quite visible. But since the characteristics of the prolonged process of natural selection are evident in an instance of play, as if millenia were squeezed into minutes, the dissimilarity offers insight. A new thought presents itself: perhaps the reason we are so beguiled by watching animals play is because when we do, we are seeing natural selection, and so life itself, distilled to its essence.”
― David Toomey, Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself