Why death?

[Applejack]

To me, there are three exquisite mysteries in life: birth, love, and death. All great art revolves around these themes. Many of us will experience all three in this lifetime, but only the last is universal.* Lately, for no particular reason, I've been pondering the purpose of death.

I'm not aware of a scientific explanation for death's universality. I assume, but do not know, that there is some chemical fragility underlying the basic structures of life - a ticking clock reminding us that all must pass away. Alternatively, I suppose that evolution could prefer species that die, thus allowing younger, more adapted lifeforms to thrive without competition from the old, less-adapted ones.

Religion (or rather, Christianity) is largely based around answers to death's meaning, but seems (to me at least) to lack an explanation of death's purpose. I know that Adam's sin brought death into the world, but why was that so? What purpose does death serve in God's plan? Mormonism, with its knowledge of high-level details of God's plan doesn't seem to account for this. Why couldn't God just have placed all of the souls on earth at once and tested them?

Do any theologians/scientists on this board have an answer?

* By birth, I mean the birth of offspring.

[Jarid in Cedar]

From pragmatic standpoint, all systems that require consumption of energy to function eventually fail. The principle reason for that, as I can see, is that the transfer of energy is in all cases inefficient. This inefficiency leads to either byproducts that can be harmful or heat release, which can alter biologically active molecules. Add in the effects of oxidation and you have a strong basis for the biological causes for "death".

[woot]

Hypothetically, if it were possible to keep an organism alive without it becoming more metabolically expensive or without risk of disease increasing during a lifespan, immortal life could be favored by selection. In practice, it does seem to get more and more difficult to maintain a body's structures and physiological processes. The key here is that natural selection doesn't act on individuals; it acts on genes. Because having two kids is the same thing as replacing yourself in the gene pool, natural selection favors increased offspring more than increased lifespan.

There's also another advantage in more kids/shorter lifespan species: they are better able to compete, because more genetic turnover means more variation, which means more grist for natural selection's mill, which means a species is less likely to lose any evolutionary arms races it's involved in, like with disease, predators, prey, or a changing environment. Death is a good thing.

[wuapinmon]

When technology advances to the point where we'll be able to download our consciousness into an electronic form, we'll never die. At that point, the interconnectedness of us all will allow for a hive mind.......singularity.

The extinction of humanity could easily come about at that point. We'll all be like the cat and the hologram in Red Dwarf, letting our bodies waste away while we play with avatars, and then finally jumping the ship once our body dies so we can live on in 0000001 forever.

[Applejack]

Thanks for the responses, all.