(Natural) Death is Evolutionarily Absurd

a reply to: swanne

The wikipedia article you quote on Evolution of aging needs a serious update. There is no discredit occurring, only a severe misunderstanding. Life on this planet is not taking of free energy from the environment, that's just so ridiculous it's beyond my comprehension how someone could believe this. We just recently stretched outside of Terra, all species have until that point been bound to the mostly fixed mass of things held down by this here rock.

I mean it's really freaking obvious to me, that unless we would be static, and slowly fading while everything else around us changed (and most other life evolved), we would need to accept death. If we are to remain immortal, it would be at the cost of slowly becoming less adaptive to our environment, so the only way as a species we could rise to the apex of creation on the planet was to allow death in the first place.

I get that where we appear to be going throws a lot of rules out of the book, and I'm cool with that, but speaking towards the past and how things have come to be up to recent technological breakthroughs, I mean it's pretty well straight forward. I don't know why you find the need to imagine this is a mystery at all.

a reply to: TerryDon79
But wouldn't evolution have protected us over millions of years of evolution
Adaptation and all

a reply to: swanne

Without picking on any particular aspect of your well thought out thread - I have to reject the entire premise.

You see, death being absurd or obsolete can only occur if there was somewhere that wasn't a closed loop system.
On this physical, tangible plane the entire universe is one big closed loop system!

Furthermore, if we could somehow remove ourselves from this situation, it would be to our detriment. We can "what if" it all day, but in the end we still depend upon sustenance grown from soil. Should we remove ourselves wholesale from the nutrient cycle by preventing death, the result would be nothing less than the continued and eventually total destruction of the very soil we depend upon to sustain us.

About the only way for this to work would be if you could somehow convince every single person to compost their humanure...which that in itself can take us all the way to feeding the whole planet.

originally posted by: swanne
a reply to: watchitburn

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

That's the key right there. Science as we know it today is a reaction to cockamammy religious nonsense and charlatans purporting to know reality, usually at the expense of our money. The Scientific Method is an attempt to cut the BS and prove definitively whatever theorem you've got going. In some respects you have to say, "Thank God for the Scientific Method."

But the "culture of science" is conservative and though its proponents maintain it is self-correcting, many a career has been broken because a scientist has put forth politically incorrect ideas and been pilloried for it just as sure as the Catholic Church punished heretics. For example, the scientist who came up with "tectonic plates," Alfred Wegner, was hotly rejected. It was only accepted half a century later. Science is filled with examples like this.

Science is extremely biased towards physical reality and has a morbid fear of admitting anything even hinting at the paranormal. It's not that these things CANNOT be studied via the Scientific Method; they can and have been. Indeed, you can find many scientific studies that statistically prove such things as telepathy. But when you get into an after-life, or such concepts as souls and reincarnation, Science just collectively rolls its eyes and treats such subjects with derision and ridicule, particularly since such ideas, in one form or another, are frequently found in religious teachings.

There is a quote, that I am about to mangle, which suggests that after scientists have struggled valiantly to answer the profound questions of the universe, they finally get to that mountaintop only only to find the theologians waiting there for them. The bottom line here is that if science is to advance our understanding any further, it must reconcile itself with studying a very big part of reality that it now rejects as impossible.

a reply to: swanne
I don't understand why different organisms have the different lifespans they do, so it's a bit of a mystery to me. However what does seem evident is that if organisms were immortal, evolution would be difficult.

originally posted by: pl3bscheese
Life on this planet is not taking of free energy from the environment, that's just so ridiculous it's beyond my comprehension how someone could believe this.

Plants turn sunlight from outside the planet into food and we eat the plants, or other animals who ate the plants. Most of our energy comes from outside the planet.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

You totally missed the point, man. Most of this energy to higher lifeforms comes at an expense. The OP is highly misleading.

originally posted by: pl3bscheese
a reply to: Arbitrageur

You totally missed the point, man. Most of this energy to higher lifeforms comes at an expense. The OP is highly misleading.

I may not understand your point because you haven't explained it very well, but I understand the point in the Wikipedia article fine and clarified that for you. I don't know what "expense" you're talking about, but nuclear fusion in the sun has the expense of 4 tons of mass being converted to energy each second, so that's the expense for that energy source I'm aware of. Once that energy leaves the sun and heads to Earth it's available to plants on Earth, and the rest of the food chain who depend on the plants.

perhaps there is another element to this. a natural balance on earth set in place given finite resources that will self destruct life after procreation.

But, as we evolve, so does the life of the earth...once we start our space colonization, we will scientifically create extreme longevity (as would be a requirement anyhow if we are gonna be colonizing things a thousand light years away). Perhaps our scientific evolution is actually a very natural biological consequence of the earth planet growing enough to start spreading its "spores" (that would be us) and no longer needs to constraints of death.


that might be a bit too "big picture" for any sensible theories, but good to entertain.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: swanne
I don't understand why different organisms have the different lifespans they do, so it's a bit of a mystery to me. However what does seem evident is that if organisms were immortal, evolution would be difficult.

That was my initial thought as well. But thinking about it, I think evolution would still occur even in the event of immortality. The only thing that would actually impair evolution is infertility. As long as living beings can procreate, then the offsprings would show new gene expression and natural selection keeps on going for them - regardless of the parent's lifespan. In fact, living beings which would be resistant to senescence would actually be beneficial in evolutionary terms, because such beings could produce way more offsprings and augment the chances that one of such lineages becomes perfectly adapted to a given environment.

The 2nd and 3rd posts in this thread are oddly cracking me up more than it should

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Yep, it's very clear what I'm saying, and nope, you're not even getting close to it. Very frustrating, but if you're really that off then I don't think any amount of words can bridge the gap.

a reply to: swanne

My initial thoughts are that gene mutation was selected for early on in biological development. Genes that didn't mutate may have stayed stable...but they were not dynamic enough to compete.

There are several methods that promote gene mutation. In this instance, we are mostly referring to free radicals.

You can see many diseases that are not beneficial for a creature that arise. Baldness, tooth decay....all arise after mate pairing occurs, so are not selected against. Tooth decay, in particular, is an issue for many animals. Hippo's that grow old tend to starve to death. They grind their teeth down so much that there just isn't enough tooth to get them past twilight. So old hippos suffer from a dental configuration that has never been selected against, since the issue doesn't arise until after mating has occured.

To me, aging seems to be tied to the benefits of gene mutation, and are thus naturally selected for.

Finite lifespans means less crowded populations fighting for scarce resources (just imagine what the planet would be like if humans alone didn't die).

a reply to: GetHyped

from a macro standpoint, the biggest issue i see would be that genetically superior iterations of humans would be stamped out by older, more powerful humans.

One of the good things about the relative short lives of humans is that longevity can tend to take a backseat to merit. Which really shapes our view of labor, and further down the chain, government.

a reply to: swanne

Far from being evolutionarily absurd, death is essential if natural selection is to occur. Death is actually fundamental to evolution.

Very interestingly, it appears likely that death and evolution both appeared simultaneously, in an organism like Volvox

Here’s a good book on the subject. Out of print, but still available in many places if you’re seriously interested.

a reply to: swanne

We have to die off in order for another generation with different DNA mix to take our place. That's the point of Natural Selection. We breed and our offspring have defenses and a mixture of traits that make them more able to deal with life than us.

But there isn't enough room for everyone to grow super old while new generations of people are created to keep up with evolution. So the old need to die off to be replaced by the young. Or you'd have to have space and resources for everyone. We don't the space or resources so the old must die and be replaced by the young. If we lived forever and didn't breed we'd all be primitive man still living in the 21st century.

The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. Time is relative depending on where you are in time.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: GetHyped

One of the good things about the relative short lives of humans is that longevity can tend to take a backseat to merit. Which really shapes our view of labor, and further down the chain, government.

Another good thing about our relatively short lives is just that, they are short Humans can be very destructive, it's a good thing we can't live forever.

a reply to: TerryDon79

Then where to look, what to look for, when it becomes information after death (is it right away, just before, just after, during, etc.), how it becomes information and so on and so on.

The search for an information that survives death is very akin to the search for elusive particles such as Dark Matter... Both share the fact that they seem to have but a limited interaction with normal matter, yet the effect of their existence can be felt every day... One may wonder if there is not a link between the two.

Imagine a scenario in which upon death, brain cells lose electrons, making them susceptible to decay via weak interaction. The atoms of the cells interact with surrounding, slow-moving dark matter, effectively saving a snapshot of the human mind under the form of a dark matter imprint. Dark matter is usually invisible but it can however interact with normal matter via Weak Interaction - it may very well also explain ghosts.

Not saying that's what I believe, far from it - I am just pointing at a general idea of concept we could investigate.

a reply to: GreenGunther

a reply to: mOjOm

a reply to: GetHyped

Finite lifespans means less crowded populations fighting for scarce resources (just imagine what the planet would be like if humans alone didn't die).

But there isn't enough room for everyone to grow super old

Humans can be very destructive, it's a good thing we can't live forever.

Such an argument suffers from the delusion that living beings on Earth are all carefully "designed" to avoid overpopulation. You are arguing that Death is the method by which the "planet" carefully avoids overpopulation, but this is just another form of the Intelligent Design argument - furthernore, it can be disproven: human lifespan has become longer proportionally with the number of people, not shorter.