Connie Barlow
In a culture obsessed with the preservation and extension of
life, defending the value of death may seem like a task fit for
few but the devil. But for biologist Connie Barlow, singing the
Grim Reaper's merits is becoming nothing short of an inspired
mission.
Having spent the last three years on a nonstop nationwide
speaking tour with her husband, Michael Dowd, this itinerant
“evolutionary evangelist” and author of such popular
science books as Ghosts of Evolution and Evolution
Extended has recently unveiled a new chapter in her running
rendition of “the great story” of our cosmic and
terrestrial history. Death, as Barlow tells it, is not something
to be feared, or even merely accepted, but is a healthy and
life-giving part of the cosmic process that deserves our
wholehearted embrace.
Is science's race to free us from mortality's grip a
misguided and perhaps even perilous attempt to override the
cosmic order? What are the evolutionary implications of making a
permanent break in one of nature's most time-proven cycles? If
we were to do away with death, what would become of life? During
a recent visit to the What Is Enlightenment?
headquarters, Barlow spoke with us about her passion for the
perishable and her thoughts on the quest for immortality.
What is Enlightenment: There's a growing body of
scientists who are convinced that before long—some even
would say in the next twenty years—we're going to have the
capacity to extend the human life span indefinitely and attain
physical immortality. Based on your own understanding of
biology, do you think such a thing could be possible?
Connie Barlow: Honestly, I haven't wanted to
think about it. But I guess I'd probably have to say yes. If
we're speaking about long extensions of life, if not actual
immortality, I'd certainly say yes. But I haven't wanted to
think about it.
WIE: Why not?
Barlow: Because I don't like the prospect. For
one thing, it will exacerbate the schism between the haves and
the have-nots because, obviously, the whole world isn't going to
have access to this. For another, I view it as undesirable
because we're having enough trouble right now limiting our
reproduction, and if we have a significant number of people who
are engaged in that sort of life extension, it will create even
more of a population problem on the earth.
But more fundamentally, I think that our tendency to avoid
the thought of death or think that there's something wrong with
death actually limits our understanding of life and our zest for
life. When people have such an individualized sense of self and
self-importance that they don't see the larger picture in which
death functions, that to me is immaturity. I mean, if you view
your individual self as being this body and this mind here, then
the prospect of death could be rather frightening. But in what I
would consider a broader, more mature understanding of the self,
the fear of death eases up. In fact, death becomes something
that's seen as good for the whole, and also good
for
individuals.
When I look at the new cosmology—which harvests
discoveries from all the modern mainstream sciences—the
conclusion I draw is that death is not only natural, it's
generative. Understanding that death is natural and coming to
peace with it can happen at any level of human development. For
thousands of years, our myths and creation stories have given us
that peace. But only recently has it become possible to see
death not just as natural but as creative and generative at all
levels of reality; not just to reconcile with the fact of death
but to see goodness in and feel gratitude for death. So many of
the things that we love and cherish in life would not even be
here were it not for death. And the way that I've come to this
more alluring vision of death has been through cultivating what
I like to call “deep-time eyes,” eyes that see the
fourteen-billion-year story of the universe as a sacred
story.
WIE: Could you give us some examples of what
helped awaken you to this more alluring vision of death?
Barlow: I'd love to. My own field is
evolutionary biology and evolutionary ecology—that is, a
deep-time understanding of ecology and biology. But the example
that was the most eye-opening for me came later in life, from
outside my own field. And that is the understanding from
astronomy and astrophysics that what powers stars is the
creation of elements.
The original simplest element in the universe is hydrogen;
it's been here since the beginning, since the big bang. In the
center of stars, gravity fuses hydrogen atoms into more complex
atoms. Our sun is fusing hydrogen into helium right now. And as
it approaches death, it will be fusing helium into carbon.
Larger stars than our sun move on and fuse carbon into silicon,
and silicon into calcium, and so on. Every single element in our
bodies, other than hydrogen, was once inside a giant star that
lived and died before our sun was born. As stars died and
recycled themselves, they sent their elements pulsing or
exploding out into the galaxy. These elements eventually came
upon primordial clouds of hydrogen gas and were caught up by the
gravity of those clouds as though by spider webs, providing the
matter from which new generations of stars could be formed. And
these stars, such as our sun, enriched as they were by the
creativity of previous generations of stars, were able to have
rocky planets around them, whereas the first generations of
stars could not.
We are recycled stardust. Everything we love and everything
we see is recycled stardust. And we're only here because the
heavens and the stars are not immortal. To me, that's an
eye-opening insight, particularly when we think of how our
religious traditions view the heavens as where God is, as
immortal. Over the life span of human cultures, stars do not
come and go. But over the life span of geological periods they
certainly do. Death is in the heavens just as much as it is on
earth.
WIE: In this example from cosmology, you're using
death as a metaphor, because the elements and the stars were
never alive in the sense of our biological definition of life.
In the way we normally think of live versus dead, they're dead
matter already—dead matter taking another form. Are you
saying that the same principles apply to living systems as
well?