alt Hacker NewsOne crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.
Replies
Interesting point. But I don’t think you must experience something to be afraid of it, even as a population. Nobody experienced the terror of a world ending nuclear war, large asteroid strike, or solar flare (alien invasion if you want to go that far), etc. and they still terrify a lot of people. Sometimes even more than death itself.
To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
the true anti-memetic
That is a cool thought, though you meant to say never experienced death themselves before reproducing. The fear response allowed individuals to statistically reproduce more often. Evolution works at the population level not the individual.
Actually, it is possible that some of them experienced the death of their brain before reproducing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904...
And, FWIW, Jesus with an after-death erection was popular enough a motive to officially get banned by the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinb...