Immortality
Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 02:56PM Every person yearns for immortality. It is a universal desire, born from the brevity and preciousness of life, nurtured by myths and hallucinations, driven by biological imperative. We all want to see how our story ends, to see what happens to our myriad personal vignettes, to see how the seductive, tentacled plot of our lives is ultimately wrapped up. Better still, we hope that our story is endless, our vignettes unfold eternally, and our plot permutates forever.
In this grand and perhaps vain yearning for the indestructible self, we overlook a more subtle immortality that runs through every person who has ever lived and sired offspring. It is not the dramatic immortality described above. It is not the endless existence of the specific biographical person we are intimately aware of, with all of the unique epigrams and memories of our distinct selves. However, there is something integral to us that has lived for billions of years and is likely to live billions more. We are a part of something enormous and magnificent that, if contemplated properly, stretches our understanding of the scope and breadth of life.
In a very real sense, we are all 3.5 billion years old. The particular bits of genetic material that inhabit the center of each of our selfish universes have propagated and continuously evolved over eons, periodically shedding one protein shell in exchange for a new one. Our body, nominally constructed of water and minerals, is home for an organizing force that has been alive for a very long time. This organizing force has migrated from one temporary home to another in an unbroken stream that does indeed sneak quietly into the realm of immortality.
From very humble and simple origins in an earlier epoch, human DNA has evolved ever broader and more spectacular exosystems to protect itself and to transfer itself from one generation of host to the next. The structure of the cell itself is an exosystem, or a "shell", to protect the fragile DNA and to give it machinery to reconstruct itself when necessary. Cells are protected by "shells" of organs, skeletons, and other complex exosystems to further facilitate nourishment, protection, and regeneration of DNA. We have evolved to an extent that we are able to construct exosystems that stand apart from our bodies, such as clothes, shelter, and even cities. These exosystems all serve to protect the corporal host, and therefore to protect the DNA that created and defines the host. Even ethics and morality, to which we often ascribe unwarranted purity and supernaturalism, can be thought of more mundanely as high level neural exosystems that allow us to navigate successfully in a bewildering world of relationships and interdependencies, in order to mate and parent, giving our DNA further assurance of protection and regeneration.
Not only does our DNA pass from host to host generationally, our bodies replace most of their cells every seven years or so. In this context, "you" are freshly reconstructed every now and then with new molecules and minerals. The only thing that is constant in this continuous renewal is the information represented by your DNA. This information, which has been refined over billions of years in an unending river out of Eden, instructs inanimate material to assemble into the replacement "you". Every person who has ever lived has been constructed from this river of information, and those that have had children have fed the river with additional trickles of information. Your body is a carbon-based host for an organizing force that itself has never experienced death since its inception so many millenia ago.
Supernaturalists often hypothesize about a life force called the soul. In a sense, they are right that there is an infomation-based essence to your being that stands apart from the chemistry of your corporal existence. However, they are wrong in postulating that your "essence" is of divine origin. Your soul, the fount of information that created and recreates you, is your DNA. It is a soul that is processed and modified by every person who ever lived. It is not a soul of personality nor an eternal encapsulation of individual ego. Rather, it is the blueprint of life, the template of animate, replicating existence.
Is this strain of DNA truly immortal? Will it live forever? History argues in its favor, given the 3.5 billion year ordeal that it has already weathered. Thus far, it has bridged countless generations, morphing into millions of species that inhabit the entire planet, populating the seas, the skies, and the earth with a plethora of stunning forms and functions. It has undergone spectacular adaptations to a wide array of inimical environments and it has survived innumerable cataclysms from within and without. At some point, it may even follow its hosts to make an extraterrestrial leap and continue replicating elsewhere in the universe.
Unfortunately, entropy will almost certainly establish an upper boundery on the longevity of this organizing life force. Nearly every theory of our future points to physical demise of the universe due, if nothing else, to inevitable decay into low energy states defined by the second law of thermodynamics. But that probable demise is likely to happen billions of years in the future. Until then, the river out of Eden will continue to proliferate, in some form or another, perhaps even on planets other than earth.
This is likely not the individualized immortality that we hoped for, but rather than rue the temporal nature of our corporal host of the DNA life force, we can choose instead to celebrate the blessing of every moment of awareness that this living river out of Eden has bequeathed to us. We are each a part of this endless river, which still has an infinity of stories to tell and vignettes to unfold. And if we are so blessed, our children will be unique signatures and twists that we will add to this stream of immortality.
(With gratitude to Richard Dawkins for the "river out of Eden" allegory).
Reader Comments (1)
maybe we are immortal...because they do not know what is beyond death