Becoming Immortal: Combining Cloning and Stem-Cell Therapy

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Why Immortality Cannot Evolve ADMIT IT: our situation is difficult because it works too well, because it’s going too fast. This paradox engages the critical essence, or ateleological sense, of genealogical and archaeological investigation. —Éric Alliez, Capital Times If there is originality in neoevolutionism, it is attributable in part to phenomena of this kind in which evolution does not go from something less differentiated to something more differentiated, in which it ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or contagious . Accordingly, the term we would prefer for this form of evolution between heterogeneous terms is “involution,” on the condition that involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the direction of something less differentiated. but to involve is to form a block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Man knows that he is changing, willy-nilly changing. Conforming with a type he is yet always as individual unique . . . The inorganic world is one stream of individuals. No following life is like the one it followed. That states perhaps the utter most poignancy of death. —Charles Sherrington, Man on his Nature The easiest solution to the problem of our becoming immortal would seem to be our evolving immortality, either via natural selection or, “with a little 46 WHY IMMORTALITY CANNOT EVOLVE help from our friends,” via eugenic selection and “Darwinian medicine.”1 But as powerful as it is, evolution cannot harness immortality and turn human beings from a species of mortal Homo sapiens forma mortalis, into one of immortal Homo sapiens forma immortalis. The problem is that evolution places a high premium on reproduction which immortality will not pay. Evolution also relies on the inheritance of genes, and there are no genes for immortality. Immortality cannot evolve because it does not pay obeisance to reproduction and lacks the genetic underpinnings that can be passed on through reproduction.2 Nothing, from genetics to neo-Darwinism, from Mendel to the draft sequence of the human genome, offers any hope whatsoever for the evolution of immortality! Evolution—descent with change or the transmutation of species—has, no doubt, shaped many of the adaptations that allow living things to make their living through interactions with each other and the rest of their environments . It is, as Charles Robert Darwin (1809–82) suggested in 1859, a first order assumption (only one step removed from empirical data) and biology’s equivalent to physic’s notion of gravity.3 But evolution has shaped and consolidated the lives of eukaryotic life around mortality, probably for more than a billion years.4 Evolution cannot now make a sea change and turn human beings into immortals. Of course, science has often achieved the impossible, and, as a scientist , I should be loath to label anything unachievable. My purpose here is, nevertheless, to explain why the immortality of human beings, or any other complex, multicellular animal, cannot be achieved by evolution and why, therefore, we must go beyond the scope of evolution to achieve immortality. WHERE DOES LONGEVITY COME FROM, AND WHY HAS EVOLUTION MADE US MORTAL RATHER THAN IMMORTAL? I believe it was David Brinkley who described United States draft laws during the Vietnam War as “so complicated that if they did not exist, they couldn’t be invented.” The same is probably true of contemporary evolutionary theory, but in the first part of this chapter I attempt to describe how evolutionary law (lore?) has evolved, since it too “couldn’t be invented.” My hope is that the reader may thereby understand evolutionary theory’s present state of existence, its potential as an explanatory doctrine, and its limitations. Stanley Shostak 47 THE EARLY YEARS Charles Lyell (1797–1875), the geologist and evolution-skeptic, dictated evolution’s fortune throughout much of the first half of the nineteenth century . Lyell fostered a version of uniformitarianism, a doctrine of what goes up will come down, arguing for a God-given equilibrium in nature, and, hence, arguing against evolution. Lyell’s preeminence was so commanding and his influence so pervasive that he was at least partially responsible for Darwin’s delaying for twenty years the publication of On the origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life...