Is Death Adapative
Does evolution select for mortality of an organism? Is there adaptive value in organism dying off. What got me thinking about this is immortality. If mankind finds a way to become immortal does that open us up to some kind of weakness that mortality confers to organisms. One possible value in death is that it frees up resources for an upcoming generation as the older generation dies off. Effectively it provides resources to a superior organism.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:45 am
Are you referring to mortality in general (including deaths from things like injury and disease), or are you really trying to start a conversation about senescence?
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:19 am
Evolution selects for nothing. Evolution is an artifact of what occurs. Events provide the inherent motive quality of “selection” as in the case of what is frequently described as natural selection — a confluence of events resulting in that which “causes” an adaptation and/or variation in the subject species. Darwin’s revelation: That which one sees is that which has been selected for. Through the eyes of Victorian Royalists and European elitists, they saw a competitive system validating superiority and class among members of a species, projecting anthopomorphically into the malignant paradigms of phrenology and established notions of superior blood, race and class, and rewarding themselves accordingly as members of the “now scientifically proven” in group.
One needs merely to look around in order to see what has been selected for. Time is the most difficult dimension of natural selection to reconcile. What is seen was as certainly selected-for as its future survival is not. The temporal nature of natural selection is poorly contemplated by most who use the concept. What is selected for is merely that which has yet to be selected out.
Darwin’s basic theory still holds. If one could follow the variations and adaptations backwards, one will certainly find the origins of the species.
And yes. Death is adaptive. That, indeed, is a remarkable and provocative question of far-reaching significance.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Random Musings:
Seeing as we have already started altering genes and their expression and are no where close to finding immortality, I would believe that by the time human kind had beat death we would have found a way to evolve without the nasty business of procreation. It would cause an interesting conundrum however: If we were to all change our genes manually in different ways - would we be the same species anymore or would we be single organisms each with their own designation? Barring manual genetic modification, could you say that man could evolve through changes in thought processes or is evolution simply a biologic change? Say in the future we, oh I don’t know, gain telepathic abilities through long term expansion of our brains. Would that be evolution or adaptation? Then again without mortality, where is the “selection”. What is the negative result of choosing a bad adaptation?
Perhaps we will not gain immortality through some halting of the aging process but through successive repair and replacement of larger portions of the body. Perhaps in this way, independent of DNA and mutations, we can evolve?
May 24th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Yes, death is adaptive. It seems to coincide with sex for some reason. Most animals that have sex die (there may be exceptions I don’t know about) , so it’s pretty safe to say that death is adaptive if all of these animals adapted in that way. I have to admit that I’m assuming the rules of natural selection apply, but the evidence definitely points in that direction.