What Is Death: A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life

244 Pages·2002·1.61 MB·English

by  Tyler Volk

WHAT
IS DEATH?
A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life
Tyler Volk
A PETERN. NEVRAUMONTBOOK
John Wiley &Sons, Inc.
WHAT
IS DEATH?
WHAT
IS DEATH?
A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life
Tyler Volk
A PETERN. NEVRAUMONTBOOK
John Wiley &Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2002 by Tyler Volk. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Volk, Tyler.
What is death? : a scientist looks at the cycle of life / Tyler Volk.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-37544-6 (cloth)
1. Death. I. Title.
QP87.V65 2000
571.9'39—dc21
00-059431
Created and Produced by
NEVRAUMONT PUBLISHING COMPANY
New York, New York
Ann J. Perrini, President
Book design: Frances White
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C O N T E N T S
Chapter 1 Introduction: Death, Thus Life 9
Part 1: Brain
Chapter 2 The Three-Pound Miracle 27
Chapter 3 We Live in Two Different Worlds 41
Chapter 4 The Grateful Self 57
Part 2: Culture
Chapter 5 Nobody Just Dies 77
Chapter 6 Managing Terror 101
Chapter 7 Death with Interconnected Dignity 127
Part 3: Biosphere
Chapter 8 Sex and Catastrophic Senescence 151
Chapter 9 Lifestyle and Life Span 165
Chapter 10 Little Deaths, Big Lives 181
Chapter 11 Life and Death at the Smallest Scale 201
Chapter 12 Conclusion: Eternity’s Sunrise 223
Notes 231
Bibliography 242
Acknowledgments 249
Index 251

I N T R O D U C T I O N :
D E A T H ,
T H U S L I F E
We age, and most of us come to accept the persistent specter of
death as an inevitable part of being alive. It’s the price we dis-
burse at the end, a price for the gift of life.
We don’t normally revel in this state of affairs, of course. I, for one,
wouldn’t mind cheating the game. But it’s futile to think about playing
without paying. Though the advances of medical science often do lengthen
our term of ephemerality, they cannot promise us eternity. In short, we are
faced with a simple fact: “life, thus death.”
This simple phrase—life, thus death—summarizes my core theme:
the bond between life and death. But I am primarily intrigued with how
this bond can be expressed (and perhaps far better expressed) by reversing
the phrase. Let’s flip the logic around and say “death, thus life.”
How can death precede life? Are there cases in which death is paid
for not at the end but at the beginning of life?
10 | INTRODUCTION
Near the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan, the dying captain,
played by Tom Hanks, looks up into the face of Ryan, played by Matt
Damon, and gasps one final order: “Earn this.” For many men had just
given their lives trying to find Ryan and send him home to safety, unlike
his three brothers who had already died. Consider, also, the animal world.
The females of several species of spiders eat their mates after copulation. By
“willingly” dying the male ensures more time for his sperm to fertilize the
female—the meal distracts her from moving on to another male immedi-
ately. These are just two examples of how death leads to life, each enticing
us away from a narrow focus on a single individual’s life to behold a wider
world of connections between beings. And, as I intend to show, the stretch-
ing occurs in places one at first might not expect. With the enlarged view
death appears not antagonistic to life but integral to it.
It’s all a matter of scale and this book celebrates scale. Indeed, the key
is to seek a much broader link between life and death than the usual sense
of death as eventual arrest at the end of a single organism’s life. It will take
a book to elaborate the idea “death, thus life” across various realms, from
society and eventually down to bacteria. My quest is to build a secular cos-
mology of death. From this we might gain an appreciation for the won-
drous links between death and life, and thus nurture the opportunity we
have to live as fully as possible in moment-to-moment awareness.
Who am I, as author? I’m not a therapist. I’m not a mortician. I’m not a
hospice worker or even involved in the health professions. I don’t sit at
home dressed in black, watching the video The Faces of Death. I’m not a
DEATH, THUS LIFE | 11
policeman, or war general, or writer of murder mysteries. I haven’t enjoyed
vampire movies since I was thirteen.
I am, simply put, a scientist. Earth biology—life on the planetary
scale—is my trade.
For years I have harnessed computer models to help decipher how bio-
logically essential elements travel within land, air, and sea. These building
blocks of all creatures—carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and the ten or so other
elements—wend in and out of organisms and swirl around the planet, all the
while manifesting in a variety of chemical, molecular forms. Some of my stud-
ies have unraveled the reasons for flows of carbon dioxide between ocean and
atmosphere. And I have peered back in time into the way the evolution of land
plants changed the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years ago. I have also
applied my knowledge about life and chemical cycles to help NASA design
self-sufficient habitats for future space colonies on the Moon and Mars.
This work has allowed me to understand some aspects of the world
that epitomize the concept “death, thus life.” These aspects are especially
profound because they are deeply ancestral to any sacrifice of war hero or
spider. A wheel of death rolling continually into life propelled evolution
along from the earliest bacteria through billions of years to the first human
handprint on a cave wall. The key to the wheel, of course, is recycling.
Biological recycling is the worm that munches leaf litter into micro-
scopic bits that are then further degraded by bacteria into nutrients that
later can become tree leaves again. Death makes life. My favorite way to
present this wheel is to actually put a number on it, to know exactly how
much life death makes.
Imagine a world without recycling, where the small plants, tall trees,
and marine algae all possess bodies so tough that nothing can digest them.