>the computer's "entire reason for existing" is to look up ip addresses,

This is trivially true, a computer's entire reason for existence is to be used by a user, and looking up DNS servers is a crucial part of what makes that happens.

Similarly, a living organism entire reason for existence is to manufacture copies of itself, and, for female mammals, that means carrying babies.

>People don't have an "evolutionary purpose,"

This is just semantic hair-splitting. Planets don't have a 'purpose' either, but every single one of them finds a star and goes around it, and the ones that don't just can't find a star close enough. It's fair to say that, in a very real sense, planets only exist to revolve around stars, their very being necessitates it. This doesn't mean they are "aware" of it.

People are similarly machines made and remade by evolution to do a single thing : spread copies of themselves. It doesn't matter that evolution "didn't mean" to make them that way, they are that way anyhow. And they will behave that way.

>there's some magical driving force to persist a species

It's not magical, it's all the hormones and electricity flowing inside every part of you. You can see it on a screen and measure its concentration.

>Thus, it is not their sole purpose.

Yes it is, Evolution doesn't care that you founded a startup or worked for SpaceX, unless those things increase your genetic copies somehow.

You can write something like "if we look at it from a lens other than biology" before your statement to make it more correct, but I was replying to a person who compared pregnancy to a parasitic relationship, therefore they were invoking biology. Biology, in no uncertain terms, makes it quite clear that this is bullshit. Every living organism, in biology's book, is a self replicating machine made for nothing but spreading copies of itself.

There are two meanings to reason. We are indeed here due to reproduction and evolution not selecting out us, but that is an explanation for the cause.

The other meaning you want to use necessarily require intelligent design - there is no higher level goal to a human’s life in itself, as that would require something designing it for such. Though sure it depends on religious interpretation as well, but then higher level goals are usually claimed - so decide whether you mean the biological cause for our existence which is simply a side effect of a population that grows and is fit to their environment, or some chosen Deity’s higher level goals for an individual. None of those makes us primitive replica generators.

I can't for the life of me figure out where exactly in my comments you're reading this "other meaning". I was just correcting your incorrect usage of 'parasite', that's literally all what my 1st comment is.

You said that babies are parasites, this is just factually false (aside from being dehumanizing and disgusting, but that's typical for most mainstream pro abortion arguments, so I will just ignore that aspect). A parasite isn't just "any organism that lives inside me and makes me feel pain", by that definition, your own immune cells would be parasites in some cases.

Outside of popular movies and video games, parasites are organisms that are

(1) typically of a different species than their host(s), and

(2) depend on 1 or more host for their entire life and reproduction cycle, and

(3) manipulate the host(s), usually maliciously, for their benefit while giving no benefit in return.

You can also add a (4)th point about the host(s) usually not "knowing" they are being manipulated, but maybe that will get too philosophical, I can't be sure if parasitised animals realize anything is wrong with them, but the safe thing to say is that

(4) the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite. It is said that sexual reproduction itself is an anti-parasite countermeasure: the 2-way genetic mixing serves as a "jammer" to make life hard for parasites.

Points (1) and (2) are trivially false for babies. Point (3) is also false, but more subtly : the baby isn't "manipulating" the mother's body, it is itself a piece of the mother's body that gained independence, and the mother's body is adapted to willingly give it whatever it needs to survive and thrive. Point (4) is trivially false as long as the mother's impregnation wasn't due to rape.

I don't understand where all the philosophical baggage about "Design" and "Purpose" came from, I'm just correcting your sloppy use of "Parasite". A female human’s body is a machine perfectly adapted to having babies. This isn't a normative statement about that body's 'higher' purpose or what it 'should' do, just an empirical observation that refutes any similarity between babies and parasites, because parasites are invading entities that exploit "bugs" and "vulnerabilities" in the bodies they inhabit and control, while babies are first-class entities that have dedicated machinery and full, intentional support from any healthy female body that hosts them.

It would be like opening a python interpreter and being shocked that you can do Arbitrary Code Execution at the prompt, *that's literally what an interpreter is*, that's what it does, why it's designed and implemented. You haven't discovered a vulnerability, you just discovered an interpreter. Hosting babies is why the female primate body is adapted the way it is, there is nothing parasitic (read as: 'incidental', 'invading', 'foreign') to it, parasitism is when you exploit a body against its own fitness, just like a security vulnerability is exploiting a program against its own purpose. A python interpreter executing arbitrary python code isn't a security vulnerability, and a female human hosting a human embryo isn't parasitism.

I don’t know where you get all these nonsense requirements for parasites, 1 is usual, but not needed; 2 is trivially not true, there are plenty of animals that are only parasitic for a specific time and will later live outside any host getting nutrients in a “normal” way; regarding 3 — I sure hope you don’t mean manipulation in a sci-fi brain controll way, because while there are very limited instances of such (toxoplasmosis and ant-fungi), this is a very big exception not a rule. 4 - how the hell knowledge even come into the picture?!

So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements, but just to clear things up, Oxford’s dictionary only has this as a “requirement”: “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense.”

And this is absolutely true of human babies, technically, no matter how disgusting the notion is. Technically true is still true.

And no, the female body is not made for bearing children. Women usually have the ability otherwise evolution would select against them, but babies are not “first-class” in any way, otherwise there would be no such thing as Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus). There is no design in evolution, it is a spaghetti code where the vulnerability of a vulnerability happened to be a feature over time and everything seems to be working statistically good enough in extant species, just enough so that they can reproduce enough to not go extint.

>there are plenty of animals that are only parasitic for a specific time and will later live outside any host getting nutrients in a “normal” way

Off course there is plenty of any thing in biology, I was describing every single parasite I know of or read about.

You can remove that requirement from the list if you want.

>I sure hope you don’t mean manipulation in a sci-fi brain controll way,

That would be ridiculous. I meant 'manipulate' as in "cause something to happen for your own benefit" which is an extremely boring way of saying that the parasite has all the agency, the host body is not cooperating with it. Unlike a baby, which the host body is bending over backward to host and nurture, the parasite is 'making its own living'.

>how the hell knowledge even come into the picture

Did you just mis-quote me on that? Because I remember quite clearly that this isn't my actual 4th point, it was a philosophical remark that I said could be a 4th point, my actual 4th point was

>>the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite.

Do you have problems with that as a necessary requirement for parasitism?

>So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements

3 out of 4 of them are true when you take the time to interpret them as I meant them, and the 4th isn't exactly wrong either. I'm curious as to your definition of "made up".

>Oxford’s dictionary

Dictionary definitions are frequently less accurate than domain specific definitions.

>an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species

>this is absolutely true of human babies

Uhm... human babies are another species?

>the female body is not made for bearing children.

The entirety of this statement truth value rests on a semantic game played on 'made'. You define 'made' as necessarily requiring an intelligent design, whereas I define it simply as whatever happens when a process produce behaviourally-consistent artifacts. The vast majority of planets revolve around stars, therefore planets can be said to be 'made' to orbit stars. The vast majority of female bodies are well-equipped to carry babies, therefore female bodies can be said to be 'made' to carry babies.

When I say 'made', I don't necessarily imply a 'purpose' or a 'designer', I'm simply pointing out the sheer consistency of a form to its function, the female body is as suitable to carrying children as a planet is suitable to orbiting stars.

>Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus)

Well, every program has its bugs :). How common is Rh disease? How many healthy babies are born for every baby attacked by Rh? Your own immune system turns mad sometimes and start killing you from the inside, does that imply that your immune system is not a machine with killing threats as the main purpose?

>good enough

This is underselling it. It's not hit or miss with a 50-50 or 70-30 %, the things you describe are extraordinarily rare, rarer than computer bugs and manufacturing defects in human-made machines.