Is Death Responsible for Diversity? Essay -- Philosophy Essays

Is Death Responsible for Diversity? few of the hardest questions we struggle to answer in life surround the phenomenon of death. What happens when we die? Is in that respect something beyond death? Is one way to go better than another(prenominal)? Is it possible to escape death? why do we die, anyway? Why couldnt we just live forever? One explanation for death whitethorn come from the story of evolution. To explore this question, let us pretend a theoretical situation, a human race in which zippo dies. (We will imagine also, for now, that organisms would continue to evolve along the same trajectory as they do at extradite.) Every organism that has ever knowed in the past would exist now, along with every organism present and every organism that has yet to exist. Not only would the world contain these organisms, but on the whole dominance organisms. However many ways there may be of world alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of beingness dead or rather, no t alive. Richard Dawkins (p 104, Dennett) All the representations of the ways of being not alive would be there, including those that we could not possibly fathom, those that are not necessarily contingent to our present environment. What this signifies, this absence of death, is a lack of raw(a) selection. When nothing can die, everything is selected for, nothing is selected against. No death implies no tests, no judgments of fit or unfit, no randomness or weeding-out of the genome, no consequence to anything that is potentially detrimental to the species. This hypothetical situation is a look at the unchanging set of all possible options, every combination of DNA that could potentially give build up to life. Every possibility is valid. This version of the world could only exist if we ign... ...t and habitat. The world would be just one big niche, where anything goes, anything is possible. If we do away with natural selection, and then we must consequently do away with height en, with evolution, with boundaries. Whenever a species acquires a new capacity, it acquires, so to speak, the key to a different niche or adaptive zone in nature. (p 208, Mayr) The key merited is contingent to the change only because the niche is locked before the change occurs. The boundaries we see are what compose the selection pressures that cause organisms to change and are often products of selection pressures themselves. there is a direct relationship between these phenomena. If we have change (evolution) and niches, then death and natural selection are mandatory. SourcesMayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York underlying Books, 2001. Dennett, Daniel. Darwins Dangerous Idea.