Death Rules: How Death Shapes Life on Earth, and What it Means For Us

By Will Cairns

Death Rules explores life from the perspective of death. We are all going to die; our lifespan is limited. That is the way it is. And yet we do our best to avoid death, and at almost any cost.

While we accept the fact of death, we seldom talk about it. Now, in the 21st century, science is offering us the opportunity to better understand the vital role of death as it shapes the success and the complexity of life on Earth, and to appreciate our place in the midst of it all.

The book explores the natural history of our individual lives and why they must be of a limited duration; how our bodies deteriorate throughout our adult life and why we cannot be rejuvenated; why a finite life might be important for species persistence; why variability is vital for success and why perfection might be a liability; and it considers how we die.

Death and the recycling of complex molecules and rare minerals have been vital for the success of life on Earth. Most organisms are not self-sufficient but thrive on the fruits of the labour of others. This has been exploited for the opportunities it offers.

As the environment in which a species lives changes, so does the selection of those of its members who are eliminated by death. It is death and failure that shape the direction of evolution, eliminating the less fit by processes driven by the influences of chance and probability.

Since life first started it has always had to deal with the reality of death. We have incorporated it into our biology and our culture, and it is everywhere and a part of us. However, if our evolved nature and our beliefs obstruct our ability to adapt to an unpredictable global environment and for which we are not prepared, we face the reality that we too may be subject to the selective power of collapse and death.

This book takes a very candid look at death and our place in the complex relationships that shape the evolution of life on a planet with a dynamic and unstable environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781925171921

Book preview

Author

Preface

Since I became a doctor I have spent a lot of time with dying people and their families. I have found the ways that people deal with their mortality to be fascinating. While my understanding of death is based on a physically deterministic, science-based and humanist view of the world, and was reached in early adulthood, I recognise that others come to all manner of conclusions. Every day, in my work, I actively support their need and their right to do so as they cope with their own death or that of their close family members.

As my medical career gravitated towards full-time work in palliative medicine – the medical care of people who are dealing with or dying from a life-ending illness, and the support of their families – I began to realize that my job was to help people to accept the normality of what was happening to them as much as, if not more than, it was to provide good control of the physical consequences of their disease.

When a dying person calmly embraces the reality of their imminent and inevitable death they can bring peace to those around them. This is not to suggest in any way that they are not experiencing loss, grief and the sadness of separation as a normal part of what comes with dying. It is just that their grieving often seems disconnected from the ways that they accept the fact of their own impending death. As a stark contrast, someone who is distressed by the fact of their dying can inflict the contagion of fear on those around them.

However, in spite of the output of science being available to almost all of us, I cannot help but observe that our community at large seems to have little understanding of the biology of death, its essential part in the long-term success of life on Earth, and what it means for our future. Only by understanding our relationship with death will we be in any position to change our behaviour and take control of our destiny.

My youth was spent observing the rather rarefied academic world of the early days of molecular biology where enthusiastic and passionate debate and a healthy dose of scepticism were a way of life. Perhaps the most fortunate and serendipitous event of my life was to have ended up in North Queensland. Here I have met a wide range of people whose work and lives have made me ponder our place in the natural world. I have been very lucky to explore some of the wilderness of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and the tropical rainforests of Queensland with people whose job it is to consider the complexity of the ways that things work and to question conventional wisdom.

When I started to write this book I thought that I knew where I was going. However, like many explorers, I found that the winds of circumstance meant that I ended up taking a very different route through unexpected places to end up in a far more interesting place from that which I had anticipated.

Introduction

I felt like the sage Markandeya, who fell out of Vishnu’s mouth while Vishnu was sleeping and so beheld the entire universe, everything that is there. Before the sage could die of fright, Vishnu awoke and took him back into his mouth.

–Martel Y. Life of Pi¹

Death is a topic that most of us prefer not to think about, even at the best of times. I am challenging you to think openly about death: it is what this book is about. But to do so means that you will have to think scientifically about the nature of the universe and our place in it. To be very blunt, I am asking you to step out of the mouth of Vishnu and to look at death, and life, without the protection afforded by the cultures within which we shelter.

I wrote this book to encourage a better understanding of life and the Earth on which we live from the perspective that has been revealed by science. Science has shown that traditional belief-driven explanations are often wrong and do not do justice to the complexity of life on Earth. They encourage us to adopt a human-centred explanation of the world that leads us to neglect the intricate and dynamic web of life of which we are a part, and on which we are and have always been totally dependent. By focusing on the role of death in the success of life I hope I will shift your perception of our individual lives and enhance your understanding of our place in the complexity of life on the only planet we’ve got.

I believe that this re-think is important because our current path seems to be leading towards ill-defined calamity. Our meagre awareness and understanding of the global consequences of our actions is placing the community of life at grave risk of a significant downsizing – and none of us should feel that we are immune just because we are affluent, or live in isolation.

I do not propose any particular solutions. I think that I will be satisfied if I have been able to enhance awareness of the scope of our problems and the reasons that we have got to where we are, and have been able to help prod us out of our self-centred complacency and short-term thinking. Only then will we have any chance of finding our way out of the mess we are making for ourselves.

This book is founded on the premise that death is natural, normal and inevitable. Everyone – you, me, all other the readers of this book, and all those who will never read this book – will die. Death is and has always been vital for the success of life on Earth. However, we seldom think beyond our own death, and those of our nearest and dearest, to consider the role of death. Most of us just live out our lives within the confines of the communities that provide our sustenance and direct much of our thinking. But there are other ways to view the world than from our limited social perspectives.

Two episodes stand out as the triggers that set me on the road to writing this book.

The first was when the commentator of a wildlife documentary, I think it was about South America, said something like …and the bird evolved to move up the mountain. "Rubbish", I said out loud to my wife. Evolution is never teleological. It is not a process that sets out with a specific goal; it is a reaction or a consequence. Evolution is shaped by chance, probability and death.

The second came over two trips to Raine Island, a remote turtle and bird nesting-site on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) to which access is restricted. I was there as a camera assistant to lug equipment along the beach, and to do the odd bit of doctoring if necessary. As with much filming on the GBR, there was a lot of sitting around watching and daydreaming while waiting for the animals or the light, and more than enough of lying in a bunk rolling over the sea.

On Raine Island I felt as though I was seeing the world through new eyes. The desolate beauty of that remote but noisy place is enhanced by the continuous comings and goings of many animals, their lives driven by the imperative to exploit the opportunities provided by death. It was as though I was able to almost feel the co-dependent relationships between species, the role of death in the perpetuation of life and the place of the individual on the scale of evolution.

My first trip to Raine was during the tropical winter when the beach was empty apart from a scattering of dry turtle bones and small groups of terns nesting amongst the windblown and strangely mounded coral sand-scape. The higher and lightly vegetated parts of the island are home to innumerable nesting birds – frigatebirds, boobies and terns for the most part – while red-tailed tropicbirds nest under the rough edges of beach rock amongst the scattered bones of dead turtles. The surrounding seas are a rich fishing ground for most of the birds – the frigates simply assault the successful fishers and eat their regurgitated catch.

At the other end of the seasons and on a hot and starlit summer night we walked amongst 14,000 gasping and sighing female Green turtles that had come ashore to lay their eggs. Their digging was the source of the mounds that I had puzzled over on the winter trip.

The tumultuous landscape is remade every night by the compulsive excavation that often unearths and scatters the carefully buried eggs of other turtles. I was reminded of the Western Front in the First World War where endless digging and explosions exposed the corpses of men who had been killed and buried by previous battles. By daybreak, their egg-laying done for the night, most of the turtles, avoiding the heat, had returned to the sea. Those that have the misfortune to tip upside down on the uneven terrain, or become too weak to struggle back to the water’s edge, bake to death under the hot sun, their distended intestines exploding out through the weak-points of their shells after their bodies have fermented for just a few hours.

Tiger sharks patrol the water’s edge watchfully waiting for a meal of dead or weakened turtle. Herons nest on the island to coincide with the emergence of turtle hatchlings from the sand, and wait to gulp them down whole to be regurgitated as meals for their own young. I saw a baby turtle scramble to the water’s edge and swim for less than a metre before being swallowed by a black-tipped reef shark. These were just the larger organisms. Everywhere – on the island, on the reef and in the open ocean – animals and plants of all shapes and sizes are similarly earning their keep and providing sustenance for others. This is the way of the natural world and most of it is unseen or unnoticed by us.

As I contemplated what I was seeing on these two trips I realised that the key to understanding the complexity of life on the island was to view it as an economy of death fuelled by a trade in energy-rich molecules and rare elements. Once these seeds were sown I started to see death everywhere in the workings of the world.

This book looks at life through the prism of death. However, any exploration of the role of death faces the difficulty that our cultural beliefs restrict how we are able to think about the universe. To undertake a journey of this nature with any hope of success we have to step outside the limitations of our traditional explanations of the world. Only by gaining a perspective unencumbered by the baggage of pre-scientific thinking can we begin to understand the implications of scientific explanations of natural phenomena and achieve an updated appreciation of where we sit in the scheme of things. Such an understanding is a prerequisite for an appreciation of the complexity of problems that, by our ingenuity and current dominance, we are creating for ourselves and our children – problems such as environmental degradation and the unappreciated consequences of life prolongation, which I’ll discuss in due course. However, as I wrote the book I soon came to realise that this is no easy task and that there are a number of issues that I would have to deal with if we were to move beyond the biological and cultural constraints that our origins have bequeathed us.

One of the most difficult challenges for this book was to portray the scale of time in a manner that makes evolution comprehensible. It is not really possible to understand how evolution happens without a sense of the enormity of the time available for its processes to operate. Most of us live out our conscious social lives from one day to the next and have trouble with the 2,000 – 4,000 years of humanity’s recorded history, let alone the several hundred thousand years of the evolutionary development of modern humans.² Therefore, it is scarcely surprising that we cannot easily comprehend the 3,000,000,000 or so years since life started (1,000,000 years for every year of our recorded history). Only by making the effort to understand the duration of individual lives against the timescale of Earth’s existence can we make sense of the ways that the changing physical conditions of our planet govern the ways that lives are able to be led.

It is also essential that we consider both the chronological and biological significance of our individual lives. It can be a real challenge to our sense of self to accept how short and finite each of our lives is when compared to the scale of the life of our planet. As my dear friend Richard Pearson pointed out to me, our individual life represents our only experience; all each of us has ever known is to be alive and, until you get to be old, old-age seems to be a long way off. Given that we find it difficult to imagine coming from nothing and not being here any longer, it is no wonder we grasp at beliefs that offer us the continuity of our awareness after our death. As self-aware beings our individual survival is of central importance to ourselves but not necessarily to the long-term success of our species – just as the perpetuation of our species is not essential for the ongoing activity of other forms of life on our planet (to some species we are the greatest threat).

A further difficulty has been to find words passive enough to explain the nature of evolution as differentiated from the processes that drive it. All too often, perhaps almost universally, evolution is portrayed in books and on television as heading in a direction, as though the goal was to get to where it ended up. It is very hard to avoid describing evolution, of which we are ourselves the current end consequence, as though it were a project directed towards the specific target of generating us as we are now. Of course we are only the end if our timeline ends now. Now in the evolution of life on the planet Earth is a point on the line of a journey to nowhere particular that may end by petering out into nothing, as has happened to many evolutionary lines once successful, but no longer extant – like a snowflake that crystallizes from water vapour in the air and evaporates before it touches the ground.

Finally there is the challenge posed by the extraordinary complexity of the interactions that shape life and the physical and chemical world of which life is made, and wherein it operates. This complexity is mind-numbing and overwhelming. The fact that we are unable to comprehend it is scarcely surprising since we are finite and one of its products. We respond to our incapacity to know it all by simplifying and generalising our explanations so as to make practical sense of all that is going on around us: in fact our success as a species has been underpinned by our ability to predict using the patterns in our world that we have identified through experience – they don’t work all the time but certainly better than if we did not recognise them. However, we must also recognise that none of us will ever have the capacity to understand it all – we just have to learn to live with that.

I have divided this book into four parts.

I. Consideration of the obstacles to an open appraisal of death

Before proceeding with my exploration of death, and what it means for us, it is essential that we consider how it is that we, as a species, have arrived at the perspective from which we view our world. Culture, and the entrenched beliefs of which it is composed, shape our efforts to understand the universe within which culture sits by placing us at the centre of that universe. Seeking to preserve itself, culture coerces us to describe the world by looking inwards from within the domain of our social lives. While culture has been at the core of our successes, it can constrain our minds by controlling and limiting how we are able to think about death. If we restrict ourselves to the perspective defined by our beliefs we are doomed never to gain the benefits of the understanding that science can bring. Even when very open we, as a community or as individuals, can shy away when the significance of full scientific understanding becomes too confronting. However, if we are not able to open our minds we risk being condemned to live out the consequences of narrowness and inflexibility. We have no choice but to try to step outside of culture and look at ourselves without bias if we are to make sense of the complexity and interconnectedness of life on Earth. You may have to give up more than you bargained for.

II. The biology of death and dying

I have taken some time in this section to lay foundations by exploring the less contentious issues on which I think we can generally all agree.

The fact is that we will all die, whatever we may dream and whatever we may try to do to avoid dying. Like all other life on Earth, our individual lives are finite and short (although, as we will discuss later, what long and short mean as measures of life is a bit unclear). Shaped by the chance allocation of the genes of our parents, our hazards start the moment we are conceived. A wide variety of the features of our anatomy and physiology interact with the lives we lead to influence the ways that we die. Throughout our lives we face a vast array of risks and probabilities, some arising from the world that surrounds us, and others from the realities of our biology. In the end every single one of us will die.

Death is integral to the success of life over 3,000,000,000 years. It is essential in providing the fuel for life. Death shapes the direction of evolution. Death can also be a tool and a tactic in the competition for reproductive success. And the mode of dying of every individual of all forms of life is subject to the whims of chance and grindingly inexorable probability.

I will discuss how death is the dominant actor in the evolutionary processes that determine the progression, the success or otherwise, of species, including our own. While a species comprises a group of individuals, the life or death of any particular individual is usually of little importance for the long-term success of their species.

III. Learning to live with death

The third part of the book explores the development of our human relationship with death. Life has evolved continuously in the face of death and, inevitably, has had to develop an accommodation with death. This is seen in the physiology and behaviour of many organisms. As self-aware social creatures, we have come to explain and experience our deaths as though they were social events seemingly disconnected from physical and biological processes. In these chapters I consider the origins and development of the biological and social mechanisms that we use to deal with death. I then move on to look at how easily we succumb to the belief that modern technology might fulfil our desire to postpone or even avoid death, and the threats this illusion poses for us.

IV. Understanding consequences

The book is rounded out by a consideration of the consequences arising from our success in delaying death and controlling some small parts of our environment – for the individual, for their communities, and for the stability of the complex and dynamic Earth on which we live. In the end everything dies and nothing is ever the same. Historically we have almost always pursued what we believe to be in our individual short-term self-interest, whatever complex forms that might take. If we fail to consider the implications for our security and our future that are revealed by a scientific understanding of how life has evolved over three billion years, and how the dynamic systems of the world operate, we seem likely to follow in the footsteps of all our predecessor civilisations – our complex belief-based communities, on which we are totally dependent, will simply collapse.

I hope that you will reconsider both your own life and death and the growing struggle within our society to find a balance between the biological reality of inevitable death and the desire that we, and those we love, do not die. Perhaps of greater importance for the long term, I want you to think about our longevity as a species on a world that we are changing so dramatically and with so little thought. When this journey is finished you may view our lives, our deaths and our place on the world very differently.

Raine Island is a metaphor – it is dazzling and dynamic, yet fragile and vulnerable. It is under threat from forces of which none of its inhabitants has any awareness, let alone control. If the sea level rises by even a modest amount the island will become an underwater coral reef like so many others – while life will go on, its integrated and dynamic mix of turtles, birds, fish and coral reef will end. If the number of turtles drops dramatically through habitat destruction or some other consequence of human activity then many other organisms will perish, unable to perpetuate the evolutionary successes of their predecessors. Whether change is induced by humans or natural phenomena, on an unstable planet life changes in reaction to, not in anticipation of, new circumstances; and when resilient life blooms again it is never like it was before.

My journey of exploration of the place of death in our lives and in the lives of all organisms on Earth has led me to an enhanced appreciation of the delicacy of the balance of our position. A detached consideration of death can confront the ways that our beliefs and culture describe the world and our place in it – it comes with some risk to our sense of ourselves, but the risk provides us with an opportunity. For the first time, science is offering us knowledge and understanding that might allow us to take some control of our future.

Only through a scientific approach, rather than through explanations constrained by culture, can we understand our world and have any chance to be more successful in the long term than profligate for a short time. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution has prepared our bodies and our brains for a world of circumstances that we ourselves began to end only a few thousand years ago – a process of fundamental change that has accelerated dramatically in the past couple of hundred years. Why is it so important to confront so many of the explanations of our world that we wear like well-worn and comfortable slippers? Because we have not yet realised that ‘business as usual’ is unsustainable, both in how we treat our world and in how we deal with each other.³

Our evolution has made us smart, but can we become wise?

I.

Obstacles to an open appraisal of death

People often casually state that death is an inevitable consequence of life, but most of us seldom stop for long to consider why that is so and what it means for us. Even less often do we think about how important death has been to the long-term success of life on Earth.

Before we plunge into this exploration of the place of death in the workings of life on Earth it is time to pause to consider how our beliefs and attitudes can obstruct our understanding. In pursuit of its own perpetuation, culture constructs barriers that limit the ways we are able to consider how our world operates. If we don’t set aside the limits imposed by our entrenched beliefs we will be constrained from exploring the new perspectives on death discussed in this book: the biology of death, the natural history of death, the role of death in evolution, death as we humans experienced it in the past, how we now cope with death and how our success at living might influence how we experience death in the future.

This chapter looks first at some of the ways that societies deal with death. It considers how the intrinsic caution and conservatism of culture can constrain the pursuit of an understanding of the natural history of death. The memes that occupy our brains can obstruct our natural inquisitiveness and desire to explore, severely limiting the ideas that we are able accommodate. It is not easy to overcome this problem as our beliefs are deeply embedded in our brains and can be hard to recognise from the inside.

The scientific revolution of the past few hundred years has challenged, as never before, the beliefs, manifest as culture, which have previously controlled the ways that we understand death. We have evolved on the two-dimensional surface of a globe that was, until very recently, our entire known universe. The cultures that evolved with us lack almost any sense of the scale of the time and volume of the universe, and of the complexity of biological and environmental systems that have been revealed by modern physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics and biology.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy⁴

While many of us accept this new information about the scheme of things, we have yet to incorporate it into how culture allows us to view the world. Therefore, we find it difficult to integrate its consequences into our search for solutions to the array of urgent problems that we are only just becoming able to start to understand. This raises doubts that, burdened by cultural inertia, we will be able to move quickly enough to avoid the consequences of our success.

But more on this this a little bit later.

Not long ago I was asked to see a woman in her early 50’s who had been diagnosed with advanced and incurable lung cancer. She had been offered chemotherapy that might have prolonged her life, perhaps even by a year or so. This treatment would probably have caused her some unpleasant side effects and may have made her very ill indeed. After careful thought she decided not to accept the offer of treatment. Her wish was to spend some time at home with her family and then to enter a hospice for palliative care until she died. With her disease untreated her life expectancy was probably for only a few weeks or months.

When I spoke with her she was very calm and peaceful. She was able to discuss her wishes openly and freely. She displayed no obvious distress beyond understandable and appropriate sadness at leaving her family and concern for their future wellbeing; although she added that they were well brought up and that she knew they would be OK. A close relative had died peacefully in the local palliative care centre and she believed that her death would follow this pattern. We were all soothed by her serenity and acceptance.

Several weeks later she was dead. She spent most of her time at home but was admitted to hospital for the last few days of her life. She had remained peaceful, dignified and without fear throughout.

Most of the dying people I talk with are not afraid of being dead. In my work as a palliative care doctor I have spoken with thousands of people who know they will die in the near future. When asked if they are worried about or afraid of anything, many say,

Dying.

But if I respond with,

Do you mean being there, or getting there?⁵

No more than 2 or 3% express a fear of being dead. These few do so most often because they have been indoctrinated with tales of post-mortem torment as punishment for their sins, real or imagined.

A much larger number raise questions that are often described as reflecting spiritual or existential issues. These explore personal areas of identity, social role and self-worth, including the quality of the life they have led, but usually do not express significant concern about being dead. I suppose that if I pushed hard enough I could provoke existential distress in many people (probably including myself) by confronting beliefs (or concerns) about the significance of our individual lives. However, that would be the antithesis of my job, which is to support my patients to find their answers where it suits them best, not to make things worse for them to prove a point.

The vast majority of those who are fearful of "dying" are concerned about a range of issues that might arise for them during the process:

•    Physical symptoms that they believe they will experience as they die

•    Loss of control and dignity that they fear will beset them as they approach the end of their life

•    Their sadness at leaving their family

•    The real and potential social and economic consequences arising during their illness and after their death that might affect their family and those whom they love – the mess they leave behind

•    Their regrets about the things that they will not have time to do, did not do, or, sometimes, the things that they did do during their life – these clearly vary with the age and circumstances of the patient

This majority has worked out some accommodation with the reality of being dead – be it intractable faith, undoubting atheism or ‘humanism’, or anywhere in between. Very commonly they volunteer something like,

"There is nothing that I can do about it", or "I have had a good life", and that "you just have to accept it".

They are not distressed by the fact that they will be dead.

Many people do not have the opportunity to air these issues. Some die suddenly with little or no warning – while discussion is irrelevant for them, it may still be an issue for their families. Others may not be offered the opportunity to talk about their dying by their doctors or their family, and die with their unspoken concerns unheard.

Few, however, are like the woman described above.

Palliative care is seldom the first and only mode of management for fatal illnesses in the developed world. Most people have been subjected to one or several of a wide range of attempted curative or life-prolonging treatments before they are referred to me. Death is experienced as the last stage of a long process of medical activity. This woman was unusual in that she did not take up the offer of possible life prolongation. For most of the rest of us acquiescence to treatment has become a duty, or a rite of passage – our family and community expects it of us. I am not sure that this is progress.

Almost all of us are able to acknowledge the fact that we will die. We know that, like our grandparents, and their grandparents before them, we will grow old and our lives will slow down and stop. That is, of course, if we do not die of something else first. Uncommonly, those of us who live in the developed world are surprised by an unexpected and premature terminal illness before the time that we think is our due. More often we are ambushed by the speed of the decline of our capabilities in the gathering of our old age.

However, just as they shape the ways that we come to understand the world, our cultures weave expectations of the inevitable progression towards death into the tales of our lives. From early childhood we integrate the reality of a finite life into the expectations that we set for ourselves. We plan a career, hope for a family and save for a subsequent retirement – often including in our reveries an ill-defined period of dignified slowing down and peaceful contemplation doing things we didn’t have time for while we were working. Over a lifetime we adopt and adapt roles to match our biological progression from child to adult to parent to grandparent.

We gradually step aside as our successor generation looks forward