The Moaning Corpse - A Meditation on Life
I was about 15 years old the first time I saw a dead person. I was sitting in a window seat of an old school bus on twisting mountain road near Idyllwild, on the way home from 4-H camp.
Around a hairpin turn was a line of road flares. A police officer waved us to a halt and then let the bus proceed at a walking pace.
I could see a tow truck at the side of the road, cable stretched over a steep drop into a pine forest. At the other end of the cable was a Harley Davidson, badly bent.
Between the tow truck and the police car was dirty wool blanket covering something on the ground, exposing a pair of well-worn logging boots. From under the blanket ran a long dark trickle the color of cherry syrup.
I went home to an empty house, put John Denver on the turntable and had a long think. The air was crisp. The sunlight brilliant. I felt strangely alive.
Mostly Dead Is Not Completely Dead
He said "to blave"
One of the most surprising things a corpse will do - or so they say - is to fart.
I’m willing to believe them. When my daughter’s beloved dog passed away at home we said our good-byes. My future son-in-law helped me carry the dog outside for one last trip in my Volkswagen camper van. When we lay Sage down on the floor of the bus she let out a long, satisfied groan. It was as if we had woken her from a deep sleep.
But Sage hadn’t come to life. Rather it was the life still going on inside the lifeless body. Hundreds of thousands of microbes continued to metabolize nutrients and expire methane. The groan was simply gas from the lungs passing over the vocal chords.
It is estimated that the human body contains 1.3 microbes for every human cell. When our heart ceases to beat our cells don’t instantly die. Brain cells can live a few more minutes…or possibly much longer, nobody seems to know for sure. Bone and skin cells can live 10-12 hours or longer. And the “wee beasties” living in your gut can just keep partying on indefinitely.
A dead body, it seems, is actually full of life.
What Is Life Anyhow?
This brings us to a bigger question. What is life?
My mother had a biology professor who asked his class this question. He then placed a candle at the front of the room and lit it.
“Tell me, is the candle flame alive?”
Well, no. The flame doesn’t think.
Ah, but chickens are alive. And clearly they don’t think.
Ok, the flame doesn’t eat.
It’s consuming the wax of the candle.
It doesn’t breathe then.
It needs oxygen to survive. It gives off carbon monoxide.
The candle flame does all the things that a living creature might do. It moves. It gives off heat. And if you hold another candle to the flame it appears to reproduce.
I think most of us would agree that a candle flame is not alive. But it certainly has a quality of life to it.
The Skinny on Genes
If you said that “genetic material” is what separates us from flames then you get a prize. You could have said “molecules” and also would have been right, but that takes the conversation in a different direction, speculating on whether or not it would be possible to have a life form made of pure energy - looking at you Arthur C Clarke.
A gene is a chain of molecules known as nucleotides - these are the monomers that make up the polymer nucleic acid, or more famously, DNA. Molecular structures that are alive, such as cats, have genes and nucleotides. Things that are not alive, such as rocks, have molecules but no nucleotides and no genes.
You can think of nucleotides as bricks and DNA as the house. Genes are the patterns, or blueprints that a bricklayer would follow to make a window as opposed to a wall, a chimney or a door.
At this point the metaphor breaks down. Consider the DNA of a lobster - where is the bricklayer who made this thing?
Information, Please
Conway's Game of Life
In a fascinating little article about dead cats on Mars that got me thinking about this whole business, Scientists Michael Lachmann and Sara Walker talk about life as a type of information processing. According to James Gleick it was Francis Crick’s understanding of information theory that lead to the discovery of DNA in the first place.
We can think of DNA as highly specialized sequences of code that can be reproduced from cell to cell in extremely sophisticated patterns. Information theory calls this process is called “negentropy” in contrast to entropy wherein a signal, say a radio signal, tends to disintegrate into noise. The idea of negentropy was proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in his book What is Life?
Aside - this reminds of a kind of joke:
Q. What’s in Schrödinger’s grave?
This ability to reproduce cellular information through a process of negative entropy seems to be one of the fundamental cornerstones of life. And it can all be boiled down to an algorithm (see the GIF of Conway’s Game of Life above), in what John von Neumann proposed as the theory of “universal constructors.”
The bricklayer in von Neumann’s system is the universal constructor. It is a type of program that can read “blueprints” (genes) and then use a trowel and mortar (RNA) to assemble the bricks (nucleotides) into replicant DNA.
Something like that.
Life, at its most simplistic, is the ability to use energy in order to replicate information.
Going Viral
It just so happens that there is a hinge-point between things that are alive and things that are not-alive. And these are viruses. Most biologists would say that viruses are not really alive - even though some of our most useful vaccines are considered “live virus” vaccines.
What makes viruses so confusing is the fact that they can reproduce themselves - passing on their information in the manner described above. But viruses can’t reproduce themselves bythemselves - they lack key components that living organisms posses. Maybe they have a bricklayer, blueprints and bricks, but no arms or trowel. Or sometimes they might have the arms and trowel and blueprints but no bricks or mortar.
Viruses are like little bits of rogue code simply waiting for a host cell to come along so that they can carry out their blueprints (genetic information) and reproduce. They need unwitting victims to help them carry out their evil plans.
For ages the answer to “is it alive?” has been answered by “can it reproduce?” Aristotle was stymied by the existence of mules, donkey-horse hybrids that are clearly alive but are born sterile and cannot reproduce. Viruses are the other end of the spectrum. They can reproduce but they lack key properties of living organisms, principally the ability to self-regulate. In some ways they are more like chemical reactions than living agents.
We Have Chemistry
Asking “where do viruses come from?” is pretty much like asking “where does life come from?” Nobody knows if viruses came before or after primitive living organisms. Maybe they all popped into existence at the same time.
What seems most likely is that a combination of chemical reactions and certain protein-ish molecules all got together in a primordial dance party and started a rhythm that keeps perpetuating itself.
But to assume this you also have to assume that there is a certain order to the universe. Rocks have rock-ness, water has water-ness and air has air-ness. These molecular properties are all separate and distinct. When energy is introduced to the mix these substances all churn away at each other in a more or less orderly fashion until fiat lux! and life springs forth.
Within this activity there is a quality that feels very much like life. In the article mentioned above Lachmann and Walker talk about a sofa as being a form of information that is not alive but is a part of life. In other words a sofa can only be produced by a living process in which at least some of the agents are alive.
For a moment let’s assume that Lachmann and Walker’s sofa is on a scale to the right of a virus. The sofa is organized information created by a living agent.
Now consider the beach stones in the picture below. Let’s put these on the spectrum somewhere to the left of the virus. The pattern of the rocks is organized information created by a non-living agent (the waves).
Beach stones in a rhythmic pattern | Photo by Philip Houtz
There is a very clear pattern to the placement of the stones - an information signal to use Claude Shannon-speak - with a little bit of a random noise (clumpy piles of rocks) tossed in for good measure. The placement of the stones contains information about the tide, the strength of the waves, the contours of the beach.
You also get a sense of aesthetics from the pattern of the beach stones. There is something pleasing about their arrangement. If these were holes punched in a piano roll you could imagine that the music might be strange but soothing.
There’s no bricklayer and no genetic blueprint contributing to the arrangement of stones on a beach, and yet there is clear sense of order and even a feeling of “life.”
It’s Life All the Way Down
Berkely architect Christopher Alexander talks a lot about these inanimate structures and patterns that have a quality of life. It’s not a black-or-white proposition. These structures all have varying degrees of life, some more, some quite a bit less.
Picture a house with a covered porch at the entryway. Now think of house with just a front door and no covering at all. Which feels more “alive?”
Moreover, and I think more to Alexander’s point, these “living structures” aren’t simply a matter of aesthetics, design or ornamentation. A structure with life will promote activities that have life in much the same way that the primordial Instant Pot coughed up the first microorganisms.
Where are you more likely to sit and talk, play cards, swing on a swing, shuck your corn and de-string your string beans? At the entryway with a porch - or at the entryway without a porch?
This quality of “more or less life” is in everything that surrounds us. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. It’s like taking the red pill in the Matrix - you will never look at rocks and flowers and street lamps and skyscrapers the same way again.
The world around us, and the cold unfeeling universe beyond that, is infused with a kind of life in much the same way that a corpse is stuffed with living agents. Not in a pantheistic “knock three times on the trunk and the tree-spirit will grant you a wish” kind of way - but in a hey, wait a second, there’s something mighty strange going on here kind of way.
Alexander’s deal is that we can tap into this life-force and use it to our benefit. Or we can ignore it and build things that thwart our attempts at happiness, choke off life and deaden the world around us. Think about your daily commute that leaves you sapped of energy by the time you arrive at work and half-dead by the time you get home. Who invented that?
And maybe that’s the meaning of life. We have a choice - are we going to move in the direction toward more life or are we going to choose something that leads the opposite way?