The Humanness of Death

I've got some bad news: You're going to die. Well, probably; thanks to the new wave of immortality innovation, you might not.

So what happens if we ditch our biological bodies for technological ones that don't face the limitations of organic DNA and death? Technological evolution has the potential to decouple us from death and other basic biological constraints, which would allow us to move forward with the group instead of waiting to become obsolete and, well, dead. This is probably a good thing, but also a potentially terrible thing too.

If you have offspring, that offspring isn't you. They have some of your DNA and some of your partner's in a new combination that adds variation to the population at large. This is how evolution works—it's not like X-Men or Pokemon, where an individual can evolve in their own lifetime. Evolution acts on the population, not the person.

I think this is the greatest tragedy of evolution. It doesn't happen to each of us; it happens to all of us. And the only way for the whole to progress is for you, me, and everyone else to eventually be left behind.

We may be able to prevent ourselves from dying by linking ourselves to technology rather than biology, but in doing so have we inadvertently killed meaningful progress in other ways? Or are we capable of evolving ourselves mentally to not get mired in the morality and wrongheadedness of the past and let society, ideas, and ourselves progress even without the fear of death? Based on these questions, I'm making the case for death, which turns out to also sort of be the the story of sex (another potential casualty of switching over to robot bodies).

While there are lots of advantages to multi-generational societies, at some point it's better for the gander if the older geese get gone. If everyone hung around forever, the genetics of the population would stagnate, never able to move in any new direction. And in evolution, stagnation often leads to extinction.

Jump forward to 8:28 for a nice discussion of evolution and extinction.

This isn't a bug of biological evolution, it's a feature. Your DNA is replicating inside you all the time. This is an imperfect process, and fortunately most of the time errors are completely silent. There's a redundancy in the genetic code, which means in a lot of cases you can swap out an adenine for a guanine and that section of DNA, if it even codes for anything, will still code for the correct thing. It's like if we could spell words with different letters but still have them be unterstood by the reader.

These mutations are not a big deal in the short term. But if you let the messy copying go on for long enough, you're liable to accumulate some more serious errors, until suddenly your DNA isn't worth the deoxyribose it was written on.

By the time an individual reaches this state, it'll either already be dead or likely no longer breeding, removing its genes from the gene pool and letting the youngsters with their intact DNA have all the fun. If said individual did try to keep breeding, there'd be negative consequences, which we see at play in the natural world.

There are species of lizards that have evolved into being entirely female. Most of these species reproduce by laying eggs that are clones of themselves, so whatever errors have accrued in mom's DNA go into the daughters. After a few generations, the daughters are getting every error that ever occurred in their entire lineage, and at a certain point the species fails because the DNA simply doesn't work anymore. There's even a term for it: Muller's ratchet. The errors move the ratchet forward a notch, and the ratchet cannot go in reverse.

Good news for us though: we have males! That's only partly a joke, because for a long time in biology, the mere existence of males was an open question science was actively exploring. Why would you waste half your population on weirdos who can't give birth to the next generation? That's a lot of potentially wasted energy.

It turns out sex exists because it resets the ratchet. Combining two individuals' DNA into the next generation scrubs out a lot of the errors and gives the offspring a relatively clean slate. It's sort of like knocking down a Jenga tower with a few uneven blocks, and taking half the blocks from a different tower to rebuild it as good as new. (Before you ask, a lot of single celled asexual organisms get around this problem by transferring DNA/RNA back and forth directly, which is a horizontal gene transfer, instead of the vertical one we impart on our offspring.)

So we have this great system of recombination and death for keeping our population evolving without crashing, and we might be about to break it.

Technological evolution doesn't work the same way. Technological evolution is faster than the biological version, for one thing. Take the use of fire by human ancestors, which could have started as much as half a million to a million years ago: the technological innovation since then is has still shown far more of an increase in complexity compared to the estimated 3.6 billion year history of life. The massive gains in human life expectancy we've already gotten, as well as those to come, are largely the result of innovation—medically, agriculturally, and so on—not the very slow process of biological evolution.

Aubrey de Grey argues that aging is a disease that can be cured, which relies on the technological form of evolution, not the biological one.

Another difference between technological evolution and biological evolution is that most biological organisms are stuck with only vertical or horizontal gene transfers. All technologies can do both, though the idea of "genetic" information transfer amongst tech may be a bit abstract. To me, "genetic" transfers when applied to technology are simply transfer of information useful to another individual. Unlike their biological counterparts, these transfers can be either perfect or purposefully manipulated (or "evolved") to serve a new function in their new habitat.

When I copy a file from one folder to another, the data arrives in the new folder with all the same information as the original. But if I need that new file to say something slightly different, I can open the copy and change it, creating a similar but still novel bit of data from the original. The same applies to hardware, I'd argue.

In technology, speciation events are frequent and extinctions incredibly rare, if they even exist. When applied to technology, I'd define an extinction as the technology no longer being available in any functional way; it may exist physically, just like a fossil does, but it no longer performs its designed task.

Let's take the microcosm of gaming console devices. We began with some very rudimentary systems that quickly developed into the systems we probably actually remember, such as the NES, which diverged into the Gameboy and the SNES, both of which have continued along their own evolutionary trajectories today. The Gameboy, or some other handheld gaming device, inspired someone to put games on a cell phone (a horizontal transfer) and now mobile gaming is as big if not bigger than console gaming.

And have any of these devices gone extinct? I still have an NES that works. It requires an adapter for my TV, but I could always just go buy an older TV. Kevin Kelly argues in What Technology Wants that technology never goes extinct and that you can still get anything you need in the history of technology made new—even flint arrowheads, which anthropology students produce in droves every semester. I've had personal experience with this, using backroad flea markets to find batteries and chargers for long dead cell phones. (It's not a hobby of mine or anything, just a thing that happened once.)

So what does this mean for us? I would hope that we are at least left with our minds, the sum total of our experiences and consciousness, but maybe that's also a bad thing. A dark secret of science, or really any progressive endeavor, is that part of the way it progresses is by letting old people with old ideas die.

Teaching younger people the newest ideas as accepted truth rather than radical notion is both a subversive and effective way for any given field to progress, because the next generation of thinkers are building off a new idea, rather than starting with the old and redoing everything.

But what if the old minds with their old ideas never perish? Will we have grown enough that this won't be a problem anymore? Or maybe through all the generations and all those years, the faulty meatbags were helping keep the collective human brain that much more honest.​