Why do we die?

As soon as you're born, you're old enough to die...

• The photo is of surfer Alo Slebir, finishing a ride on a 108ft wave at “Maverick’s” (on 12.28.2024, near San Francisco CA )…

• The subtitle is my translation of a German proverb…

• Let’s begin by noting that religions (except for Buddhism) are structured around “salvation from death;” so religion makes death a central fact about being human; in this it accurately reflects the centrality to human experience of knowing that I’m going to die

• While all living things die, only humans know from early in life that death is inevitable

• Contrary to this long history, however, death is not a threat or a curse: it’s a condition of being a living thing

• For “living things” are processes: of cell-reproduction, protein formation, and mutation

• Darwin correctly intuited that reproduction entailed frequent mutation, which in turn allowed species to adapt to living conditions, food availablity, etc.

• But when Darwin published his explanation of this discovery in The Origin of Species [1859], he knew nothing of genes

• For while Darwin was completinghis writing, Gregor Mendel [1822-1884] was cataloging the characteristics of cross-breeding pea plants [Pisum sativum], while living as a friar before becoming abbot of the Augustinian abbey of St. Thomas in Brno Czechia

• Darwin found himself unable to form a theory of inheritance: how the traits of one generation are passed on to the next

• Mendel discovered there are heredity-units (which he called “factors;” they were named “genes” only a generation later) that are inherited in patterns related to what he called their “dominant” and “recessive” character

• Mendel published his studies in 1866, but they were misunderstood and ignored; in 1900 his work was re-discovered and soon combined with Darwinian evolution to creae modern genetics

• So now we know that traits in parental genes are passed on to their offspring by means of genetically & that mutations occur

• Thus genes age as well as mutating: genetic transmission is a process and so is life itself

• All processes acquire defects in the course of performing; that is, in the course of their “lives”

• These defects accumulate—sometimes magnifying one another—until the process becomes unable to function

• So: death comes when the processes that we ourselves are can no longer function

• This is true, as well, of the individual organic processes that sustain us, such as vital organs

• It follows—as the proverb has it—that death is a condition for being a living thing…

• This bleak but accurate formulation seems to require closing with a joke:

  • Time flies like an arrow

    Fruit flies like a banana!