Jeoss’s Origami Blog

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is where the irreparably damaged, infected, useless, or cancerous cells of an animal either voluntarily or by command of surrounding tissue terminate themselves for the good of cellular society. Prior to this, they first give away their valuable, salvageable constituents to the rest of the cells before being destroyed in a clean manner so as to prevent an inflammatory response. Such processes prevent humans from having webbed feet at birth, developing tumors or diseases, etc.

If this is the way nature does it, why don't humans? Is the human tendecy to be incredibly reluctant towards the removal of certain people unnatural? In other words, does its lack of a widely used 'programmed human death' system disrupt society by allowing its destructive, wasteful, or infectious members to continue to cause problems?

It's amazing how nature can be so logical about things. Either nature intended humans to be illogical, or we're just doing something wrong.

Let's take it to an even larger scale. Humans are a part of the society of the entire biosphere, and, as a whole, our actions have undoubtedly caused serious harm to it. It isn't hard to make the argument that we act like a cancer, a destructive force that seems to be unhindered by the population controls we're faced with. Perhaps, eventually, humans will face "programmed species death" in an effort by the biosphere to save itself. Remember the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still"? (Ok, most likely not but stick with me here.) It ends with the humans facing annihilation by the other worlds of the universe, who feel threatened by the presence of our destructive and violent technologies in space.

But, our extinction by the will of the biosphere seems impractical to me. That would only quicken the destruction of the world because humans have made things so bad that we truly are the only ones who can fix it before a catastrophic collapse in the biosphere. I feel it has become our responsibility as a species to justify our continued participation in the biosphere by the collective effort of every individual of our 6.7 billion population to quickly reverse our negative global impact. Just think, 6.7 billion people. Don't you think such a feat would actually be a simple task with that kind of brainpower, willpower, manpower?

"The decision rests with you."

(P.S. - For those of you who didn't catch that reference to the previously mentioned film, for crying out loud, watch it!)