Why things evolve like they do

The main goal is to understand, and thus I will oversimplify the physics.

We can understand the whole history of our universe if we agree that
at the origin we had an immense amount of "primordial" energy.
It should be obvious that this was a very unstable state.
In fact this primordial energy started to try to find a more stable state.
This is the moving rule for our universe:

reach a more stable state

And the first step has been the generation of our 3 dimensional space.
It should be obvious that such an action need energy.
Having space and energy we can speak of "energy density".
Distributing energy on more space diminish the density of energy.
Then it was possible that the first fundamental particles could condensate.
The rest of the story is well known.
But be aware that nature reach a stable state by

building more complicated structures!

It is very important to be aware of this! Look at the past history of the universe: at first we had hydrogen atoms (eventually some helium ones) which then collapsed together (by gravitation) and ignited the first stars with fusion and thus created complexer atoms. This changed the situation opening more possibilities for a way to bind energy. Supernova explosions created more heavy atoms (thus more complicated objects). Finally we had the building of planets on which some conditions for more complicated chemistry existed.
There is a recurrent rule in this process:

Then a new situation is created and this open new possibilities.

Please, have a look at the Chaos Theory to better understand how something may suddently happen which change the whole situation.
Also consider that many chemistry reactions are more probable then others, just think of the binding of two hydrogen atoms with one oxigen: water!
It is also in chemistry so, that building more complicated structures bind more energy. This explain the increased complexity of anorganic molecules and out of them the building of organic components which then ignited what we see as life forms. The process toward more complicated structures is going on till today, and we are at present one of the most complexed one.

Try to see how the rule mentioned above was (is) working in our universe:

let the amount (concentration) of something be high for a long time
out of this steady state something new will arise
the process above should be repeated many times (be steady for some time)
now we have a new situation in which a new component is at disposition
This new situation creates new possibilities which were impossible before
A new process is ignited and a new step in evolution has been reached

You can easily see the process above applied to stars, planets, chemistry and finally to life. The evolution of our universe always follows this path.

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