In a message dated 9/29/00 8:53:41 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
coyyote@hotmail.com writes:
> "Professor Lee Silver, a geneticist at Princeton University, says any
> attempt to achieve immortality would go against nature.
>
> He said: "Death makes perfect sense in terms of evolution, in terms of
> passing your genes on to the next generation.
>
> "If we did not die then we would be around competing with our children and
> that is not very good for evolution."
>Fellow Extropians, please enarmor me with a set of counter arguments to this
>assertion below as well as other classic deathist positions ?
I'll get to the technical reasons why this is wrong in a moment, but just the
idea that the interests of polynucleotide chains come before those of living,
breathing, human beings is just unspeakably vile. What kind of person would
want billions to die, with all the attendant suffering, to speed mutational
changes in DNA?
Technically, he's not right anyway. If he means "evolution" in the sense
of an individual or a gene, they would be better off not killing themselves
/their carriers. If he means some vague concept like "the good of the
species", Darwinian evolution doesn't select for that; it selects for
genic benefits. The population as a whole may be more or less fit with
exogenous death; it depends on whether selection is stabilizing (tweaking
an optimum) or directional (changing population means) and on complex
details of variation in selection pressures.
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