Is Death Responsible for Diversity? Essay -- Philosophy Essays

Is Death Responsible for Diversity? Some of the hardest questions we struggle to answer in life surround the phenomenon of dying. What happens when we die? Is there something beyond death? Is one way to go better than another? Is it possible to escape death? Why do we die, anyway? Why couldnt we just live eer? One explanation for death may come from the story of evolution. To explore this question, let us imagine a hypothetical situation, a world in which nothing dies. (We will imagine also, for now, that organisms would continue to evolve along the same trajectory as they do at present.) Every organism that has ever existed in the past would exist now, along with every organism present and every organism that has yet to exist. Not only would the world contain these organisms, but all in all potential organisms. However many ways there may be of be alive, it is certain that there argon vastly more ways of being dead or rather, not alive. Richard Dawkins (p 104, Dennett) All the representations of the ways of being not alive would be there, including those that we could not possibly fathom, those that are not necessarily contingent to our present environment. What this signifies, this absence seizure of death, is a lack of natural selection. When nothing can die, everything is selected for, nothing is selected against. No death implies no tests, no judgments of fit or unfit, no randomness or weeding-out of the genome, no consequence to anything that is potentially detrimental to the species. This hypothetical situation is a look at the unchanging set of all possible options, every confederacy of DNA that could potentially give rise to life. Every possibility is valid. This version of the world could only exist if we ign... ...t and habitat. The world would be just one rangy niche, where anything goes, anything is possible. If we do away with natural selection, whence we must consequently do away with change, with evolution, with boundaries. Whenever a s pecies acquires a new capacity, it acquires, so to speak, the key to a contrastive niche or adaptive zone in nature. (p 208, Mayr) The key merited is contingent to the change only because the niche is locked before the change occurs. The boundaries we see are what create the selection pressures that cause organisms to change and are often products of selection pressures themselves. There is a direct relationship between these phenomena. If we have change (evolution) and niches, then death and natural selection are mandatory. SourcesMayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York Basic Books, 2001. Dennett, Daniel. Darwins Dangerous Idea.