What Biology Tells Us About the Acceptance of Life and Death

When Queen Elizabeth II died, the media were full of photos and film clips covering the stages of her life—as a child, as a teenager, as the young Queen, as an old lady. We saw her children grow up, themselves marrying and having children. Her son Charles, whom we have followed across different life stages—for example, as husband of Princess Diana—is now an elderly man, having become King Charles III.

This panoramic view of a life spanning 96 years highlights what we as humans are: in constant change and development. Whom do we consider as being Elizabeth? The attractive woman becoming the young Queen or the old lady standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waving her hand? The human being I am referring to was in constant transition over time—from conception to death—not a static person as we might have thought of her when she was still alive.

In a comparably recent book on the philosophy of biology, John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson argue that living beings are more fundamentally processes than substantial things. Organisms appear comparably constant over time but, in essence, are highly dynamic. Breathing means continuous gas exchange, of oxygen and carbon dioxide, in the time range of a few seconds. Think of the intake of food and water, the utilization in the body, and, finally, the excretion of substances. These physiological processes are describable as the constant flow and integration of component material through and in an organism.

One definition of life, termed autopoiesis, originally formulated by the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, is that an organism not only forms a dynamic system that exchanges energy and matter with the environment but also through this changes continuously in a process of self-creation and self-preservation. That is what marks the difference between living organisms and machines.

The Difference Between Organisms and Machines

Machines are constructed by humans for the purpose of inflow and outflow of materials or signals. They can also be shut off and on. But machines cannot change their own structure as is done by living beings, which are metabolically embedded within a dynamic ecological system. Living beings have to be constantly active to stay alive (breathe, eat, drink), they cannot be transiently shut down; that would mean death. In this self-creation process, everything flows, but at different rates: Cells in the stomach exist for days, liver cells regenerate every year, and the bones are replaced every 10 years. This knowledge, by the way, implies that any part of our physical body is younger than our actual age.

We have come a long way from the life and death of Elizabeth II to the theories of living systems. Of course, we as humans are such a living system. What we perhaps can learn from this scientific discussion is that we should see both sides of the coin. In a complementary way, there is an individual whom we can identify with his or her seemingly static properties over time: my spouse, friend, sister, neighbor, …myself. I wrote “seemingly” because, depending on the time scale, between microseconds and decades, our bodies are always changing: the transitory states as living beings—from one breath to the next, from childhood to old age.

The states so far were physiologically defined; psychologically, we also transform and constantly learn. Humans can stay open and flexible for new experiences and develop their personalities over the course of a lifetime. On a short time scale of minutes, our affective reactions come and go. I was just angry at a situation. The next minute I have perhaps forgotten all about it. The excitement of my emotional self waxes and wanes. This is the meaning of “everything flows”: We are more process than a thing. We are influenced by myriad factors from the past, and we influence the future in myriad ways. This fact is realized at present, the conscious island of what we experience right now and that metaphorically moves steadily toward the future.

Transition From Birth to Death

Life is about the transition from being born to having to die. Dying makes new life possible. In functional terms, one could say that in order for a new generation to blossom, the old generation has to step down and eventually die. Is there a way of using this knowledge to accept the transitory nature of ourselves and our loved ones?

I have written a Psychology Today post on how we try to cope with the prospect of death. The monotheistic religions have a comforting answer in that the person lives in eternity in an envisioned afterlife, embodied at a prime stage of his earthly life—not too young, not too old. Also, religious people do have doubts. Then, what can we do to not enter an existential crisis? The spouse, children, close friends, a colleague are the most valuable people around us who make life worth living. We consider them as individual more or less stable entities with unique personalities. The idea that they will die is so unpleasantly terrorizing that we usually don’t want to think about this prospect. Or, we imagine how loved ones will die at the age of 96, just like the Queen, after a healthy and fulfilling life.

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Not everyone dies at that age, though. Disease strikes. Grief over the loss of a loved one is then all too natural and even necessary to eventually cope with the situation. When we think of our spouse, it may be too difficult at first to accept the transitory nature of her life. That she must die. How about our own life and death? Can we maybe accept our existential foredoom if we think of ourselves as necessarily in constant transition? Accept that I must die as people of all generations before me have died and all following generations will die?

Buddhist psychology actually teaches such a dynamic conception of the self and of life as a means to accept the human fate. There is more to this, not just theory, as meditation practices of various origins are a means to let go of the self. I have written in a Psychology Today post about how the transitory loss of the sense of self and time through such practices makes people happier; they learn to let go. To learn this is not possible at once but in a process of learning over time. The biological theorizing presented above is strikingly similar in that it proposes a dynamic over a static conceptualization of life. Maybe we can utilize this knowledge to learn to accept our own fate and that of our loved ones. Not right away, but with a positive learning curve over our lifetime.