The Biology and Politics of Death and Life

One of the very basic lesson that the futile circle of life teaches us is that every beginning has an end, and with every end comes a new beginning. Death and life are two faces of the same coin we call life. Be it life of a human or a worm, a star or an ice crystal, there comes a time when it shall end and transfigures into something else. A plant blossoms and flourishes in the 'height' of its time. That flower becomes a seed, falls to the earth, rots, dies, and gives birth to a new plant. And so life continues.

Here one wonders: is death of the old essential for a new life to emerge? From a biological point of view, which seriously restricts the purpose of life to survival and reproduction, death is a crucial necessity for life. The only means an organism can sustain itself in an environment of constant change is by adopting change as its guiding principle. Given that life processes are driven by fairly hard-wired genetic codes, any adaptive change in life requires a corresponding change in genetic constituents of organisms. A changing environment can alter the genetic constituent of a single organism to a certain extent. However, most of these changes produce only subtle short-term functional consequences. Besides, their random and unpredictable nature means that, in the long-run, they end up more deleterious than useful to the organism. To produce a significant functional adaptation, they need to be combined, recombined, and selected over a long period of time. An efficient way of achieving this is through shuffling of various genomes, as is the case in sexual reproduction. This produces new organisms, with genes better adapted to the environment than their predecessors. However, this process is extremely slow. There is almost no significant adaptive difference amongst immediate generations. This might necessitate a rapid generational turnover, accelerating genetic reshuffling and potential emergence of adaptive traits. 

In such scenario, older organisms may not survive indefinetly. Limitation of all sorts of resources needed for survival means the newer, better adapted organisms survive, while the older less adapted ones perish. With population expansion, increase in inter- and intra-species competition, and other environmental pressures, the life span of older generations must have gotten shorter. In addition, there is a web of life connecting one life form in the planet with another, in life or death. Or perhaps there is another related reason why death became intertwined with life. Regardless of the reasons, death and life, as we know them, exist in an intricate and complicated balance.

So much for theoretical evolutionary biology. How does death factor in other human affairs? Humans kill each other when they don't agree on some issues at certain levels. Civilizations destroy each other. Ideologies fight and cancel each other at some point. What is the relevance of such death? Essentially, this also boils down to evolution. In a world of scarcity, competition and adaptation are the norm. Thus another human with competing intentions, resources, ideas, civilization, etc is a challenge to be tackled. Conveniently, death/murder is the most straightforward way of tackling a challenge that nature has thought us. Indeed, the easiest way of solving a problem is eliminating it.

But, one can only solve so much problems, and problems have a tendency of getting bigger and more complicated. In the mean time, we happen to be highly evolved, smart, and at times moral creatures capable of solving complex problems. Although this trait has not stopped humans from slaughtering each other after every disagreement, it buffered the savagery of death to a certain extent, and gave rise to  more complex means of tackling personal, cultural, societal, civilizational conflicts. It is fair to say that we have now reached a point where simple murder of a human contender is widely morally unacceptable. Instead, assimilating and enslaving the contender without necessarily and directly ending their lives became the norm. Of course, such assimilations proceed after the good-old physical dispute, and are often decorated with pretexts ranging from enlightenment to saving lost souls for the good lord. 

Today, we live in a globalized world, which is wealthier, happier, more democratic and civilized than ever before in human history. This, of course, is the view of the victor, the one that effectively assimilated global cultures, resources, politics, philosophies, and economies over the past centuries. To the benefactors of this globalized world, a new life is born out of the dead old system. This life is dear and wonderful. To the 'loosers', however, this might sound rather odd. Yet,in many instances, the assimilation was so successful that those who were defeated and lost everything to the victor do not even understand that they were robbed. In fact, they envy the brave new better world and make it the prize of all their endeavours. The unique thing about assimilation is that it always works best for the victor. However hard their efforts are, losers of the fight have no better fate than being better slaves. 

So, in a paradoxic coincidence, this brave new world of knowledge and prosperity  happens to be a time of great degradation too. Yet, as is true for our nature, death borders a new life on either side. 

to be continued...