Begin forwarded message:
This was perhaps my father's greatest scientific talk, the perfect
balance of
genuinely exploratory scientific thought and a popular lecturing style
that
had earned him a place in Time magazine's cover story on the twenty
greatest
teachers in America. I only wish I had could include the slides he
used to
show, which ranged from scientific charts to cartoons from the New
Yorker.
Elijah Wald
THE ORIGIN OF DEATH
(c) 1970 George Wald
When one has wondered over the years about the origin of life, as I
have done,
one comes inevitably to ask oneself, just what kind of thing is one
trying to
bring forth? Need those first primitive organisms on the earth, for
example,
have had such complex apparatuses of reproduction as all organisms
possess
today? And then one comes to the curious question: Need those first
organisms
have died? Because if they didn't need to die, they needn't at least
be in
such a hurry to reproduce. And this brings one to this question of the
origin
of death.
For not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never
die; it
need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and
becomes
two new amoebas.
In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in
evolution. One
can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic
corpse. This
is the journey that I would like to make with you. What I should like
to do,
of course, is to begin with the first living organism on this planet
and then
pursue evolution onward, asking the question: When did the first
organism
appear that cultivated the habit of dying? But that is just what I
can't do.
As in so many other evolution stories, I have to be content with a
poorer
thing, and that is to discuss this transition in terms of contemporary
organisms, of organisms alive today.
Let us begin with a familiar, single-celled organism, the amoeba. Its
nucleus
divides by pinching into two equal halves, then the whole amoeba
divides. Thus
we have two organisms where we started with one. This is the usual way
single
celled organisms, plant and animal, tend to reproduce, just by simple
division: so called fission.
Occasionally they do something a little different. Reproduction in the
single-celled organism Paramecium is usually by fission, but sometimes
it
engages in what we call conjugation. Two organisms, each containing a
large
nucleus (macronucleus) and a small nucleus (micronucleus), come
together side
to side. Then the cuticle breaks down between them. The macronucleus
is by and
large the working nucleus. The micronucleus represents a store of
genetic
material. The next thing that happens is that the macronuclei
disintegrate and
the micronuclei divide, and something very interesting happens that
makes one
think a little of sexual reproduction: there is an exchange of
micronuclei, of
genetic material. Then the Paramecia separate, the micronuclei divide
repeatedly, then the Paramecium divides repeatedly. One ends up with
eight
brand new Paramecia just like the pair with which we started.
In the generation just before mine there was a very distinguished
zoologist
named Loren Woodruff. He began to publish a series of papers, the
first of
which was entitled something like "Two hundred generations of Paramecium
aurelia without conjugation." We waited a few years and another paper
came out
with a title something like "Five hundred generations of Paramecium
aurelia
without conjugation." Finally this series reached its culmination in a
paper
entitled "Eleven thousand generations of Paramecium aurelia without
conjugation." So Professor Woodruff lived a happy and useful life, and
convinced all of us that Paramecium can live indefinitely without
conjugation.
But in the course of these researches Woodruff made another discovery.
You
see, every morning he'd come into his laboratory and find two
Paramecia where
he'd left one the night before; so he'd carefully separate them. One
Paramecium, he thought, can't conjugate. But that's where he was fooled,
because watching these Paramecia so intently he discovered still a third
wrinkle in this process which he called endomixis. It's a sort of
do-it-yourself conjugation. In endomixis the macronucleus in a
Paramecium
disintegrates, the micronucleus divides, one of those new micronuclei
grows up
to a new macronucleus and you have a brand new Paramecium.
Then there is a fourth process, which is very interesting. It is called
syngamy. In syngamy two cells fuse to make one; and that, of course, is
essentially what happens in sexual reproduction. So, here we have,
just among
these single-celled organisms, four different ways of going about
reproduction
but no necessary dying, no corpses.
Let us now take an enormous jump in evolution, to a lower
invertebrate, the
sea anemone. We've gotten from a single-celled organism to a very many-
celled
organism. It is not very highly specialized, having only two cell
layers where
we have three. It has only an ectoderm and endoderm; we also have a
mesoderm.
It is radially symmetrical, which we think rather primitive compared
with our
bilateral symmetry, our two-sidedness. Yet this is a big jump from
single-celled organisms. The sea anemone splits down the middle,
reproducing
by simple division, simple fission.
That kind of process is rather a habit at this level of organisms. A
close
relative, the Hydra, reproduces by budding. A bud grows, finally
separating
from the parent Hydra, and that starts some new Hydras.
Next we take another enormous jump in the hierarchy of organisms. We
have a
flatworm named Planaria. Such an animal is bilaterally symmetrical, as
we are.
It has three germ layers, as we do. It has its nervous system
concentrated at
the head end. It has rather good sense organs. It represents a big
jump from
Hydras and sea anemones; yet we see this organism reproducing by simple
division. It pinches in at the waist and separates into two parts,
each of
which then regenerates whatever it lacks—the tail end cultivates a new
head,
the head end a new tail, resulting in two brand new flatworms where we
started
with one. A number of flatworms go through this kind of process. One
called
Stenotomus breaks into five or six fragments; then each fragment
regenerates
whatever it lacks.
I thought that with Planaria perhaps I had finally found an organism
that
could just fade away. A Dutch worker named Stoppenbrink many years ago
began
to starve Planaria. As he starved them they began to consume their own
substance, following a definite program First they absorbed whatever sex
products there were. Then they went to work on their digestive
systems, which
weren't doing them much good anyhow. Then they started absorbing their
muscles. In this way the flatworms got smaller and smaller. The only
thing
they didn't absorb was the central nervous system; so that as they got
smaller
and smaller, they came to look highly intellectual—all brain and no
worm. By
this time I was panting, waiting to read about the moment when
Stoppenbrink
went into his laboratory, and behold! there were no more flatworms.
But to my
great disappointment, instead he started feeding them again, and they
rapidly
regenerated everything they had lost. Then, however, Stoppenbrink made a
discovery; for what you get back in this way is a brand new flatworm.
He found
that if you periodically starve flatworms and feed them again, they go
on
living forever. I am sure that there's a moral in this somewhere.
The furthest I have been able to pursue this way of reproducing by
simple
division was into the real worms, close relatives of our common
earthworm.
There is one with a beautiful name, Enchytraeus fragmentosus, that has
no sex
organs at all. It divides entirely by breaking up into many pieces;
then each
of the pieces regenerates anything it lacks, and one has that many new
worms.
But long before this, organisms have taken up a quite different way of
reproducing, the sexual mode of reproduction; and it is in the most
intimate
associations with the sexual mode of reproduction that death comes
upon the
scene.
I can describe the situation best in the terms in which a distinguished
zoologist of the nineteenth century, August Weismann, described them.
Any
organism that reproduces sexually begins its life as a single cell, a
fertilized egg. The single cell divides repeatedly, eventually to
become an
adult organism. In the course of its many divisions, there is a line
of cells
that constitutes what Weismann called the germ line, which will
eventually
produce the mature sex products, eggs or sperm. In the course of those
repeated divisions there is also produced a body, what Weismann spoke
of as
the soma. At sexual maturity this organism mingles its eggs or sperm
with the
eggs or sperm of a similar adult of the opposite sex; so one has a new
fertilized egg, which in exactly the same way, by repeated divisions,
produces
both sex products and a new body which at maturity, again, mingles its
sex
products with those of another adult organism. Thus one has the next
fertilized egg that by repeated divisions produces the next adult
generation.
And so on and on, from generation to generation.
On this simple basis August Weismann stated two fundamental
principles. The
first he spoke of as the isolation of the germ plasm. I think the way
we would
say it now is that genetic information passes always in one direction,
always
from germ plasm to soma; never in the opposite direction, from soma to
germ
plasm. That's why there can be no inheritance of acquired characters. An
acquired character is a change in the body, in the soma, and there is
no way
that this can be transmitted into the germ plasm, and hence inherited.
The other principle stated by Weismann he spoke of as the potential
immortality of the germ plasm. You see, germ plasm goes on making more
germ
plasm as well as bodies. The line of germ plasm goes on without a
break. And
now we see what death is. Death is the casting aside of the body, of
the soma,
after it has done its work. That work is to carry the germ plasm, to
feed it,
to protect it, to warm it in a warmblooded organism, and finally to
mingle it
with the germ plasm of the opposite sex. With that, it has completed its
function and can be discarded.
The thought that life is through with the body once sexual
reproduction has
been accomplished is repugnant to us as men. I shall have more to say
of this
later. Yet now I should like to say that, repugnant or not, this would
be no
surprise to a salmon. For in salmon, and eels, and many such
creatures, it is
all too clear that reproduction is the last act of life, and that the
preparation to reproduce is simultaneously the preparation to die.
I should like to speak of one such animal, the lamprey. So-called sea
lampreys
are probably not familiar to some of you, but they are quite familiar
to us
along the coasts. That's because of their life cycle. Lampreys have the
general shape of eels, and are frequently called lamprey eels, but
they are
not eels nor are they even fish. They belong to a small group of the
most
primitive of living vertebrates, the jawless vertebrates or Agnatha.
They have
no jaws, just a sucker disc with a kind of coarse rasp on it. When
they get a
chance, they attach themselves to a fish by that sucker disc and just
begin to
rasp their way in. If it is a big enough fish and the fish holds out,
the
lamprey may end up completely inside of it. A lot of this has been
going on in
the Great Lakes, as many of you perhaps know, because the digging of a
canal
persuaded the lampreys, instead of going down to the sea as they had
done
heretofore, to go into the Great Lakes. For a while they had almost
cleaned
out the whole Great Lakes fishery.
The lamprey begins its life as a wormlike larva, with no eyes, buried
in the
mud or sand of a swift-flowing stream. It stays that way for perhaps
two or
three years. Then it goes through a first metamorphosis, in the course
of
which, among other things, it acquires eyes. With that it gets itself
out from
the mud and sand and starts migrating downstream, usually to the sea,
where it
grows up. At sexual maturity it goes through a second metamorphosis.
There are
a lot of changes, but one of the most striking is a complete
disintegration of
the digestive system. That animal will never eat again; it loses its
entire
apparatus for consuming food. Then it starts its journey upstream.
I got my lampreys in the Exeter River in New Hampshire. A hydroelectric
development and a dam had been built across the river. The good people
of
Exeter had been throwing bottles and tin cans into the water below the
dam for
generations. There wasn't much water and it was pretty perilous, but
there
were those lampreys still coming up with the first warm days of
spring. How
they got themselves over the dam I do not know. I suspect they took to
the
shore, because one of these animals on a sexual migration has only one
thing
on its mind, and that is to get up into its spawning ground. There it
makes a
nest of round stones, the females lay their eggs in the nest, the
males shed
their sperm over the eggs, and with that they're through. All the adult
lampreys then die; there is nothing more left in life for them.
The freshwater eels have a life cycle that's just the reverse of that
of the
lamprey. It was discovered by a great Danish oceanographer, Johannes
Schmidt,
many years ago. It had been a great mystery until then, where the eels
reproduce. The eels of the shores of the Atlantic are of two different
species, European and American. All of them come together to spawn in
overlapping areas of the Sargasso Sea, the region of the South
Atlantic that
includes Bermuda. It represents the deepest and saltiest part of the
Atlantic
Ocean. Having made that enormous journey, the adult eels spawn and
die. Then
the baby eels make their way back alone. We have no idea how they get
back. It
takes the American eels about 15 months to come back to our shores,
metamorphose, and head upstream. It takes the European eels three
years to get
back home. There is no record as yet of any baby eel ever getting
mixed up and
going to the wrong place. When they get into fresh water, they live
there for
five to fifteen years, growing up. Then at sexual maturity they go
through a
second metamorphosis. There are a lot of changes: the eyes blow up to
twice
their former diameter, four times their former area. This animal is
getting
ready for a deep sea journey. Among other things, there is a complete
collapse
of the digestive system. Before beginning this enormous journey that
will take
the adults to the Sargasso Sea, those animals have had their last
meal. They
will never eat again.
A more familiar organism, the Pacific Coast salmon, has a life cycle
like the
lamprey's. It begins its life invariably in fresh water, grows up a
little
way, and then goes through a first metamorphosis, losing its spots and
nice
colors. Up to that point it had looked like a freshwater trout. Now it
turns
silvery, and goes to sea, where it grows up. At sexual maturity it
metamorphoses again, the flesh becomes pink, its color changes. There
are all
kinds of changes, including again a complete collapse of the digestive
system.
These salmon, before beginning their migration upstream, are through
with
eating. They will never eat again. In fact, in many of the males, the
jaws
become deformed, so that they can no longer meet. This animal isn't
interested
in jaws anymore. In this way it begins its journey upstream. It is no
fun. The
bears are waiting for it, the Indians are waiting for it, the
sportsmen are
waiting for it, the canning industry is waiting for it. Those handsome
travel
folders show you the salmon leaping over falls. That is no fun either.
They
beat themselves to pieces doing that kind of thing. The salmon that
reach the
spawning grounds are already dying organisms. They're all torn up,
with great
wounds in their sides which bacteria have invaded. They are capable
only of
that last act of reproduction, and that's the end of them.
So it is all too clear in these organisms and many others that
reproduction is
the last act of life, and that the preparation to reproduce is
simultaneously
the preparation to die.
Sometimes death doesn't wait for the act of reproduction to be
accomplished,
but takes part in the act. There was a golden period of insect
observation in
the second half of the nineteenth century. We had Henri Fabre in France,
August Forel in Switzerland, Sir John Lubbock in England, and Maurice
Maeterlinck in Belgium who wrote about the life of the bee. While these
biologists were watching insects so intently, great interest was
aroused in
the habits of the praying mantis. The praying mantis is a voracious
animal. It
will tackle something much bigger and stronger than itself, and
usually wins.
It was observed that when a pair of mantises is copulating, the
female, which
is a much bigger animal, will occasionally just swing her head around
on its
beautiful, stalklike neck and quietly begin to devour the male. He
goes right
on copulating, while she goes right on eating him. As long as the
male's last
two abdominal segments are left, they go on copulating.
Some years ago I visited my good friend, Professor Kenneth Roeder at
Tufts
College. When I got there and asked for him, a student told me,
"You'll find
Professor Roeder down that hall, last door on the right." So I went
down, and
there I found Ken Roeder sitting on a soap box watching praying
mantises. He
offered me another soap box and we sat there, watching together. He
told me he
had been doing this for years. He told me that, if you've got a female
mantis
alone in a cage, and put in a male, that male instantly freezes. The
praying
mantis, like a lot of other animals, such as frogs, don't seem to be
able to
see anything unless it moves. The male knows that, and he's watching the
female very carefully. If she looks away for a moment, he takes a
hasty few
steps forward. Then he freezes again as soon as she looks back. Roeder
said
that this can go on for hours. If the male is fortunate, he reaches the
female, mounts her, and goes through a normal copulation.
Incidentally, Roeder
told me that once an American male mantis starts copulating, the
female never
bothers him. It's our better standard of living. But often the female
sees him
first. With that, she grabs him, always by the head. Then she begins
to eat
him, always starting with his head. As soon as she has eaten off the
head, the
male goes into a very interesting pattern of behavior. He plants his
front
feet squarely and begins to circle around them, meanwhile going through
violent copulatory motions. In this way, Roeder told me, such a
headless male
will frequently succeed in mounting the female and going through a
normal
copulation.
Ken Roeder is a distinguished neurophysiologist. He was anxious to
know what
was going on here, and eventually worked that out. There is a copulatory
center in the last abdominal segment. But there is an inhibitory
center in the
subesophageal ganglion that holds the copulatory center in check. It's
all
very simple. You don't need a female to remove this inhibition. Roeder
used a
razor blade to cut off the head. Once a male loses his head, the
copulatory
center is released. So here is an instance in which killing the male
helps to
stimulate the reproductive act.
At Harvard we have an arrangement whereby undergraduates who feel like
and
seem to be up to it, can start doing research in their last couple of
years.
Some years ago a Radcliffe girl came to me to do a senior research. I
had just
found a few dozen activity cages in the animal room that weren't being
used,
so I put two and two together, and dreamed up a beautiful problem for
that
Radcliffe girl.
An activity cage is just a cage in which a rat can live in a little
squared-off living compartment that ordinarily has its food and water.
He
lives there perfectly well, but any time he likes he can go through a
little
open door into a very carefully balanced running wheel, and can run if
he
feels like it. When he gets through, he comes back in and eats and
generally
goes to sleep. When he wakes up, he goes into the wheel and runs
awhile, and
then comes out and eats, and sleeps. That's the way most animals,
including
rats, go through their day. Such a rat doesn't get anywhere by
running. It
just does it anyhow. A normal animal is likely to run anything from
two to six
miles a day.
Life brought me rather early to vitamin A - but sometimes I grow a
little
restless and want to expand my horizons. So I thought, why not do
something
with Vitamin B? Just then that Radcliffe girl turned up.
I wasn't going to be reckless, I was going to start with Vitamin B1,
thiamine.
Thiamine is an important vitamin. Pharmaceutical houses all over the
world
have to be ready to estimate how much thiamine is in various foods. I
don't
know exactly how they go about it now, but in those days they kept big
animal
rooms full of rats. They would put a group of rats on a thiamine-
deficient
diet and let them develop rat polyneuritis, which is the rat form of
what's
called beriberi in human beings. Every morning a bunch of girls would
come in,
put on white coats, and go down the line of cages. They would take
each rat
and would give it the twirl test: They would pick up the rat by the
tail, hold
it over a table, twirl it and drop it. If you do that with a normal
rat, he
just gives you a dirty look and runs off; but if you do this with a
rat that
is beginning to be thiamine deficient - polyneuritic - he has trouble
getting
his balance back, righting himself again, and that is the first sign of
polyneuritis. Once you saw that, you could begin to feed these animals
various
foods and estimate how much thiamine was in them.
It seemed to me that we could do better than that. I thought that if
we took
away a rat's thiamine, as it went into polyneuritis, it would of
course stop
running. That way we would have an early and quantitative sign of
thiamine
deficiency.
Well, that's where I was fooled. I haven't heard it cited lately, but
we used
frequently to quote to one another what we called the "Harvard Law of
Animal
Behavior." It says, "Under the most rigidly controlled conditions, an
animal
does as it damn pleases." That's exactly what happened this time. As
we took
the thiamine away from these rats, instead of stopping running, they
just
began to run their heads off. They ran day and night, sometimes as
much as
forty times their normal running. Meanwhile they were losing weight.
Occasionally, though we tried to keep that from happening, we'd come
in the
morning and find a rat dead in the running wheel. The counter would
show that
somehow it had struggled out a last mile in the previous night.
Well, that seemed extraordinary, and got us pretty excited. So I
wondered, how
about Vitamin B2, riboflavine. If you take riboflavin out of the
synthetic
diet, again the rat begins to run its head off. If you take away its
water,
the rat runs; if you take its food away, the rat responds by running.
If you
take away both its food and water, it runs - though you can't keep
that up
very long and still have a rat. What was going on? All of us are told,
usually by someone who is just about to pick our pockets, that
self-preservation is the first law of nature. Here were animals going
directly counter to that rule. If the animal had just gone to sleep
in a
corner of its cage, heaven knows what might have happened. T he
Radcliffe girl
might have got married; or we might have just got bored with the
experiment.
Those animals were just killing themselves.
That made me plunge into the literature; and then I learned that the
universal
sign of hunger, of genuine deprivation of food, in all animals from
protozoa
(those single-celled animals) to man, is increased activity. You
might think:
Those animals are looking for food. But they're not; they are just
driven to
run. In the heyday of this kind of experiment, people tried all kinds of
things. They took the stomachs out of animals. Your sensation of
hunger is
just the response to a kind of deep, slow contraction of the upper
part of the
stomach, called hunger contractions. Those animals behaved just like
the
others. One could take the cerebral cortex out of an animal. Such an
animal
was incapable of recognizing food; yet when it was hungry, it ran. It
couldn't feed itself, but if you poked food into its mouth, it
swallowed and
so was fed. Then it would go to sleep, then it would wake up and run
until it
was fed again, after which it would go to sleep. Our rats weren't
looking for
food. Such a hungry animal is not asked to run; it is told to run.
These are
orders, not requests. They are forced to run.
I think that what we have here is a kind of small scale model for a
well known
phenomenon, a hunger migration. The most famous of the hunger
migrations, one
that all of you have heard about, is the migration of the lemmings. The
lemmings are rodents that live high up on the mountainsides in
Norway. There
is a mythology about this that says that in a lemming year the
lemmings come
down from the mountains in hundreds of thousands if not millions, and go
rampaging through the cities, driving people indoors, stopping all of
the
traffic. They're on their way to the ocean. When they reach the ocean
they
plunge in, and in an act of mass suicide, swim off and are never seen
again.
Well, it isn't quite that way. Lemmings are rather cute-looking but
unsociable organisms. A lemming ordinarily will tolerate no more than
one
other lemming of the opposite sex. When a pair of these, traveling
together,
meets another such pair they sort of growl at each other and each pair
goes
its way. Norway is of such a shape that for animals wandering off the
mountainsides, many of them reach the sea; and it is true that many of
them
then go into the water and swim off never to be seen again. But they
were not
searching out the sea. The lemmings on the other side of the same
mountains
in the same way reach the plains of Lapland, and go wandering off
across those
plains to die.
That is the point. It's pretty well realized by now that that kind of
migration is impelled by hunger. It happens in a population that has
outgrown
its resources. Animals are hungry, and a hungry animal has to run.
It's
driven to run. It isn't looking for anything. It just has to keep
moving.
You might think that the point of such a hunger migration is
colonization. You
might think such a horde of hungry animals leaving their home
territory are
looking for a better place to live. But there is no such place. If
there
were a better place to live, they would have found it long before.
There is no
place for them. The point of a hunger migration is not to colonize,
but to
remove the migrating animals. The end of every hunger migration is
the death
of the migrating animals.
Some of you may wonder why I include men in this pattern. You may
say, "Well,
I don't run around when I'm hungry." That's because you are said to be
civilized. That gets in the way of all kinds of sensible patterns.
If you
want to see men behaving this way you have to catch them in the raw.
One way to do that is to observe an infant. Every young couple knows
what
it's like with a new infant. It is just the classic animal pattern.
A new
infant wakes up, starts to writhe, and yells its head off and grows
red in the
face, and is full of activity. Every muscle is working. Then you start
feeding it. Usually it falls asleep in the middle of the feeding. You
have to
keep patting its bottom just to get it to finish feeding. Then it
sleeps
awhile, then it wakes up, writhes and yells and has to be fed again.
That's
the way it starts its life; until that young couple civilizes it into
eight
hours on and eight hours off.
The other way to catch human beings in the raw is when they're
asleep. There
was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which
the
cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate
students
were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a
thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only
way he
could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.
Some years ago, in the laboratory of Professor Curt Richter at Johns
Hopkins,
he offered a group of medical students the extraordinary privilege of
a bed in
the laboratory. There were a few formalities: Before the medical
student got
into bed, he swallowed a balloon attached to a rubber tube that came
out of
his mouth and went to a mercury manometer which recorded through the
night the
motions of his stomach. Then, that cot was not an ordinary cot. It
was very
carefully balanced, so that if that medical student moved in his
sleep, that
was all recorded on a revolving drum. Well, in just the classical
pattern, in
a four-hour cycle right through the night, the medical student's
stomach would
begin to go through the slow, deep hunger contractions. As they
reached their
peak, the medical student began to toss around in his bed. Then the
hunger
contractions would die down, and the medical student go back to sleeping
quietly, until four hours later he went through the same cycle.
As for a human hunger migration, there is a beautiful passage in
Herodotus's
Histories which has it in classic form. Herodotus is describing the
origin of
the Greek games, what we now call the Olympic Games. He says that in
the
reign of Atys, son of Manes, there was a great famine in Lydia. It
persisted
year after year. After seven years, the king ruled that all the
people must
spend every second day in athletic games and on alternate days they
would eat.
After seven years of this, the famine still persisting, the king
divided the
population in half, half to migrate, the other half to remain. That
brings us
at last to man.
It's rather odd that we regard mass suicide on the part of lemmings as
an
aberration, as a kind of psychopathic behavior; whereas our way of
dealing
with the same problem is considered normal. Where the lemmings go off
to die,
we go off to kill; for it's equally true for the human migrants that
there is
no other place for them. Every place is occupied. Have you ever heard
of
people migrating to a place fit to live where there were no people
before?
There are always people. If the migration ends in a colonization, that's
through conquest. It is strange that we look on that as normal and
proper,
whereas the lemmings seem to be doing something aberrant; for
biologically
there is much to be said for the way lemmings go about it.
On the one hand, the way the lemmings do it, there is a minimum of
dying. As
soon as enough lemmings have left the center of population, there is
enough
food for those that remain, so the migration automatically stops.
Second,
there is no destruction. The lemmings' home territory is just as good
as it
ever was. Third, and whenever I say this I shudder, since I can't jump
over my
shadow, but a selection process is at work. It's the hungriest
lemmings that
go off to die; the ones that are doing better stay home. Whereas in
the human
way of doing things, we pick the flower of our manhood to go off to
kill and
die. The lemmings are exercising better biology.
I would like to return now to the repugnant thought that life is
through with
animals once reproduction has been accomplished. That is not true for
man.
To relieve this situation of the usual Pollyanna practice in which,
whenever
one describes something uncomfortable, one explains that it's not true
for us,
let me talk about bees. All of you know that the heart of what goes
on in a
bee colony is what is done by the workers. The workers build the
hive; they
take care of the young, they forage for food, they clean the hive,
they run
the air conditioning system, everything. They do everything; and yet
they are
sexless females that have no part in reproduction. The only sexual
female in
the hive is the queen. And that's the point. If animals such as bees
have a
society, then individuals can serve the purposes of that society, and
whether
they reproduce or not becomes irrelevant. We human beings have a
society, and
that's the way it is with us. Beethoven, so far as we know, had no
children;
Bach had a lot of them. Who cares? That isn't the reason we go to
Beethoven
and Bach. Rembrandt had one boy; Isaac Newton had no children. Who
cares?
It's completely irrelevant. For organisms that have a society, this
becomes a
complete irrelevance.
Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of
immortality. I am
speaking now, not of immortality of the soul - I don't really know
what that
means - but of fleshly immortality, of immortality of the body. Over
the
centuries and the millennia, one has searched for the Philosopher's
Stone, the
Fountain of Youth, all of those efforts somehow to abolish death.
That age-old quest for fleshly immortality is a hoax. Peter Medawar
has a
book called The Uniqueness of the Individual, and in its first two
chapters
you will find this all laid out. Medawar points out that if we already
possessed every feature of bodily immortality that one could want, it
would
change our present state very little. As Medawar says, we'd all like
to grow
up, so let's be able to reach something like 20 years of age, and then
never
grow any older. Then he adds: let there be no natural death.
Medawar says
that at that point he got worried, and went about asking all his
physician
friends in London whether they had ever seen a person die of old age.
All of
us go about with the familiar concept of death of old age, of natural
death.
It turned out that none of the doctors he knew had ever observed it.
I think
if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause
of
death, he'd be thrown out of the union. There is always some final
event,
some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes
off a
life. No one dies of old age. Nevertheless, said Medawar, no natural
death;
and then he said, "Let's give them a bonus of perpetual fertility."
No matter
how long this person lived, he'd be as fertile as at age twenty.
That's about
all one could ask for, isn't it?
Medawar points out that with all these conditions fulfilled, our lives
would
have changed very little, that is if one went on living human lives,
the way
we are used to living them. Every time you cross a street you risk
your life;
there are cars, trucks, trains, and planes; there are viruses and
bacteria.
They need to live, too, and they'd be working away still. There are
electric
circuits, and all the other hazards. All the insurance actuaries
would have
to do is hang around for awhile, and pretty soon they'd send you the new
rates. Matters would have changed so little, says Medawar, that
possibly our
patterns of old age and death are essentially following the inevitable
patterns, were we, in fact, immortal.
☛ The strange thing about all this is that we already have
immortality,
but in the wrong place. We have it in the germ plasm; we want it in
the soma,
in the body. We have fallen in love with the body. That's that thing
that
looks back at us from the mirror. That's the repository of that lovely
identity that you keep chasing all your life. And as for that
potentially
immortal germ plasm, where that is one hundred years, one thousand
years, ten
thousand years hence, hardly interests us.
I used to think that way, too, but I don't any longer. You see, every
creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life
that
stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this
planet; and
that is about three billion years. That really is immortality. For if
that
line of life had ever broken, how could we be here? All that time,
our germ
plasm has been living the life of those single celled creatures, the
protozoa,
reproducing by simple division, and occasionally going through the
process of
syngamy - the fusion of two cells to form one - in the act of sexual
reproduction. All that time, that germ plasm has been making bodies and
casting them off in the act of dying. If the germ plasm wants to swim
in the
ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the
air, it
makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a
man.
The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around
within
us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions
of years
ago, when it was making fish. Then at a later time it was making
amphibia,
things like salamanders; and then at a still later time it was making
reptiles. Then it made mammals, and now it's making men. If we only
have the
restraint and good sense to leave it alone, heaven knows what it will
make in
ages to come.
I, too, used to think that we had our immortality in the wrong place,
but I
don't think so any longer. I think it's in the right place. I think
that is
the only kind of immortality worth having - and we have it.
--
Can I borrow your underpants for 10 minutes?
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