The story of evolution on earth goes back over 4 billion years and starts with the appearance of tiny single cells whose evolved forms we know today as bacteria and archaea. Such single cells are called prokaryotes. Those early cells, regarded as the first forms of life, would have just a few of the present day prokaryote abilities.
I can only imagine that some particle structures in a highly fluid environment developed membrane like surrounds. They attracted into their more settled interiors suitable particle energies from their surround and grew in size and shape. Larger flexing cells split naturally in that active environment. Doing so produced two cells each with better energy gathering surface to cell volume ratios. Over time cells evolved a way of splitting, using their internal energies. It was a step on the evolutionary ladder that has always been about particles coming together in ever better and more efficient structures and for the purpose of satisfying their energy needs.
Much later we have evidence of the first eukaryote cells. The current eukaryote cells are the basis of all plant and animal life. They may have evolved when larger prokaryote cells engulfed smaller ones and the arrangement was found to be to their mutual benefit. Those engulfed cells may well have evolved to be early forms of mitochondria that can process energy and store it in its parent cell. Present day eukaryote cells have in them a number of membrane surrounded organelles that, blike mitochondria, deliver specialist services for the cell.
The evolution of all eukaryotic organisms was at first only in the fluids of seas and lakes. Not until plants colonised the land was it possible for creatures to leave the sea and feed on plant energies, evolving over time into the land animals we know and into us. Plants made this possible because specialist chloroplasts in their cells gave them the ability to take in sun energy, carbon dioxide and water and grow the source of energy that is their carbohydrate structure.
Go back to the time of those first cells and ask how could the supposedly “pushed around” inanimate particles of those early structures become the energy desiring, living, pro active cellular particle structures that we today call life. The answer must surely be that particle energies were never inanimate; they were always seeking to satisfy their desires and that all evolution has been about their desires.
It means we humans evolved for the purpose of satisfying our particle desires and if we want a continued and content existence we should be mindful of that.