Princeton
Review by Walter Cummins
Endless Endings brings to mind lines from Hotspur’s dying speech in Henry IV, Part 1: “And time, that takes a survey of all the world, / must have a stop.” Solé takes his own survey of all that dies in our world, including a mention of the eventual thermal death of the universe, and along the way that of living beings, cells, machines, the human mind, languages, information, cites, and just about everything else.
Solé, a Spanish physicist and biologist who studies complex systems, evolution, and the origins of life, begins his investigation with detailed chapters on biology as a system and moves on to the cessation of other systems fundamental to our existence. As his title proclaims, endings—deaths—are all around us. Nothing escapes the endlessness. If time itself doesn’t have a stop, everything that exists within time does. The primary lesson about existing is that it is impermanent, but each form of death “has its own meaning and is experienced differently.”
But before the biological discussions, Solé considers the implications of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, and the title doctor’s quest to reverse death by animating an assembled creature with new life from the parts of corpses. While the resulting being turns out to be a failure, in recent years state-of-the-art laboratories have assembled genes to create a living cell. But that cell is also inevitably mortal. Solé attributes this fate to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. Cells, like all systems in the universe, move to a state of disorder.
Ironically, the programmed death of cells is necessary for the survival of life by fighting off infections and cellular errors. For humans past the age of reproduction cells often mutate into killing cancers.
Machines too break down over time with survival curves very similar to those of humans. We even relate to them with a version of “our instinctive empathy and affinity with other living beings.” These bonds can be emotionally strong, as seen in the grief some people experience at the breakdown of a mechanical dog.
Unlike the finality of physical death, humans can still be biologically alive despite a destroyed mind and the loss of memory that gives meaning to life. The cause is physical. Because neurons do not regenerate, the brain’s connections are damaged, impairing cognition. Like cancers, that’s much more likely with aging.
Solé considers the quest for immortality, especially that of the billionaires who can finance complex experiments. He explains why these attempts are doomed, especially because of the numerical limits on the times specialized cells can divide and renew. Nothing, no matter how well-funded, can overcome that limit.
While languages do not die biologically, their disappearance can be attributed to demographics, populations choosing more accessible alternatives with the result that the use of many languages fades away. Hundreds of them have. Solé finds that this loss of linguistic diversity has been paid a price for civilization because the erasure of the cultural legacy. He even considers this much worse than the loss of biodiversity.
Closely related to the consequences of the death of languages is the death of information. As when everyone who has a memory of a dead human is also gone, destroyed and lost records obliterate evidence of a historical past. The deliberate destruction of libraries with millions of books is a grim cause. In other cases, the obsolescence of storage technologies is responsible. Solé also blames the deliberate falsification resulting from disinformation. We are deprived of our heritage and are undermining our future.
Solé, revealing an impressive familiarity with a wide range of subjects, indicates the similarities of the processes that result in many endings, but he also shows what is unique about them. Still, one significant uniting factor, is the prevalence of loss. Endings envelop us. They are inevitable. Yet while some are an essential step in the continuation of life processes, others come at a cost to human civilization.
