By Erik Dolson
Last night I read an article in the Economist newspaper about a start-up company in California (where else?) with a $3 billion war chest trying to “cure” mortality. Their scientists are closer to the fountain of youth than those who've tried before.
I wrote a letter to the editor, essentially saying that death is not a bug but a feature, an essential turnover by which humanity refreshes itself to succeed in a changing world.
It goes even deeper than this. Individual death is ubiquitous in the biological world. All lives end eventually. Consequently, it would seem that natural selection may have “selected” for death very early in the history of organisms, that death was favored very close to the time when life itself began.
In fact, evolution may have demanded death so that new genes could carry each and every species forward through time. Because we are more than just individuals. We are members of families, tribes, and communities.
If some lived forever, and were able to gather unto themselves resources during that eternal lifetime, species would stagnate unless external forces brought lives to an end.
Under this “essential mortality,” even warfare might once have been a mechanism of renewal, or “creative destruction” to borrow a phrase from capitalism. Not so much now, when the human brain has developed to where “winning” a war might involve extinction of all life, but perhaps in the not distant past when physical strength and higher intelligence were selected through combat.
We don’t know if other species contemplate their own death. There is no reason to believe they can’t, besides the hubris that for millennia has allowed men to think they are center of the universe simply because we don’t understand the languages of others.
Absent extreme turmoil, nothing wants to die. But all do. Religions world-wide reflect the struggle of man to answer the “why?” of death, besides a facile “why not?” Most offer intangible answers that prioritize selflessness over selfishness.
“It’s God’s will, my son,” may not satisfy when we are bereaved. But even our anguish when one we love is lost may have benefit and be the result of evolution.
Perhaps the “why” of death is “because we have to.” Because, as individuals, we have to get out of the way so that the tribe may thrive, so those with new genes more suited to a world that is hotter or colder or drier or wetter than the one for which we evolved may take our place.
The start-up in California trying to solve the “problem” of mortality might ironically represent the greatest threat of all to humanity: Stifling the process of renewal, their $3 billion might cause stagnation of all mankind.
At the very least, if the company is successful, there will be revolution in every corner of every society where law and convention are based on the assumption that no one lives forever.
If some can, but others can not, to whom or what will we entrust the power to make that decision: democracy, authoritarianism, capitalism?
No