What Is Death - Tyler Volk

WHAT

IS DEATH?

A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life

Tyler Volk

A PETER N. NEVRAUMONT BOOK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

WHAT

IS DEATH?

WHAT

IS DEATH?

A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life

Tyler Volk

A PETER N. NEVRAUMONT BOOK

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 any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,

605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, [phone], fax [phone], email: [e-mail].

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

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

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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

e age, and most of us come to accept the persistent specter of

Wdeath as an inevitable part of being alive. It’s the price we disburse 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 immediately. 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 stretching 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 cosmology of death. From this we might gain an appreciation for the wondrous 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 biologically 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 studies 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 microscopic 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.