Death
Discussion
Benjamin Suriano:
* Towards an Expanded View of Death ?
“Surprisingly, the study of evolutionarily older single-cell organisms suggests that cell aging and death is not an obligatory attribute of life on earth. Obligatory death as a result of senescence—natural aging—may not have come into existence for more than a billion years after life first appeared. This form of programmed death seems to have arisen at about the same time that cells began experimenting with sex in connection with reproduction.”
- William R. Clark, Sex and the Origins of Death (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xi. T
he big question is of course why these primordial cells, such as bacteria, which given adequate conditions could eternally divide themselves without the original individual cell passing away, would nevertheless risk assembling themselves into complex multicellular organisms. This also challenges whether one can accurately speak of a “programmed death” as a necessity within the development of multicellular organisms that sexually reproduce, rather than as an experimental accident possibly surmounted in the long run under new forms reproduction."