Death by Design

by *ahermin

marita

Artist’s Comments

In their invisible world, cells communicate with each other, work together, reproduce, and die, all to benefit the larger organism of which they are part. The observation of cell interactions reveals a society astonishingly similar to our own human world.

So it may come as a rude shock to realize that planned obsolescence is part of Evolution’s way. Our most cynical suspicions pale beside the reality of what Evolution has done to us: Our bodies are designed with malice aforethought to deteriorate with time, to decay and to die. Aging and death are not incidental failings, or a piece of unfinished business. We don’t just wear out like an old machine. We are designed to fail after a time, with the same deliberation and the same superb engineering that we recognize in the strength of our muscles or the resilience of our livers. Evolution has specified our mortality just as surely as she has designed us to eat and to breathe, to work and to reproduce.
Nature’s sweet name is spoken with reverence and gratitude. For some of us, Evolution is the closest thing we have to a God. Suspicions of her motives do not sit easily with us, and we resist mightily the notion that it is she and none other who has slipped us the Black Spot. Even researchers in evolutionary biology have been slow to recognize the signs of purposefulness in the cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, decline and death which we see all about us. But signs there are everywhere, once our eyes are opened to them. The one that brought the issue home to me most vividly is the story of dietary restriction and life extension. In experimental studies, animals that are fed less live dramatically longer. If Evolution knows how to help an organism to dodge senescence when food is scarce, why has she withheld this blessing when resources are abundant?