Is there an evolutionary advantage to death?: Philosophy Forums

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Is there an evolutionary advantage to death?

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Is there an evolutionary advantage to death?

123savethewhales
Assistant Professor

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Joined: Mar 25, 2009

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Posted 10/14/09 - 09:46 PM:	#51
I guess I draw too much differences between the physical and the trait. What I meant to say was that you need the physical change to randomly evolve first, and if it so happen to land on a trait that works it the physical design will be kept around until it stops working. Of course selection works with the end result of the physical part, the traits. But DNA only encodes the physical. Traits are also not independent to each other. Often time one physical part comes with many traits. A lot of useless traits can get passed on, providing that it doesn't harm the species enough to offset the benefits gain by the positive traits the given part provides. Things like music appreciation for example, leave many evolutionary biologists scratching their head about it's functionality.
Keep it simple.

CalicoCat
Initiate

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Posted 10/19/09 - 11:22 PM:	#52
In the context of advantage to the entire speices, death then would be like the trash can in which you throw out the used paper towels to make room in your hand for the fresh clean ones, because it's always better to have fresh clean paper towels handy than old used ones, by a virtue that is indisputable except in a perverse self-destructive system, that wants to sabotage itself. Death in a species may serve a similar purpose to intelligence in the human mind. If we define intelligence/learning as discarding old information for newer and more useful information, for the benefit of survival, then the death of organisms with the old-school genomes creates room in the limited survival space that is called Earth for new organisms with the latest and greatest update on the species. Essentially it's like saying that each succeeding generation is like a version upgrade on the species. Perhaps nature learns, in the same way as the human brain leanrs. Maybe you could even look at it like the human brain is the best natural analogy to the process of evolution itself, almost as if the entire process of physical evolution finally managed to capture its entire essence in the workings of a 3 pound lump of flesh you could hold in your hand, almost like this is the true and final physical child of physical evolution... Cause as far as I can tell, we're either going to dominate the planet forever, or else self-destruct. Either way it seems that evolution stops with the human brain. And looking at it this way, then yes, death is no longer gloom and doom. Death becomes life itself. But on the other hand, death may not be so much an advantage as it may just be a reality which is overcome through constant reproduction of the species. Either way you look at it, death happens

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