I think it important to understand that death is an evolutionary -adaptation-. Organisms were effectively born immortal, and had to learn (as collectives, as multicellular organisms) to die. Death was a desirable adaptation just like flight or representational thought. And it was a crucial one, because the processes involved require bodies sensitive both to history and the present — perhaps even to the incipient future.

By insuring the turnover of life’s vehicles, nature acquires the capacity to assemble and activate new abilities, sensitivities, and opportunities. Among the startling results is an endless developmental ladder that continuously produces new progressions of structural and relational flexibility — just as required for ever-more sophisticated intimacies with itself and the universe of time, space, matter, and energy.