What Is Death? : A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life

what is death? A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life Answering the question "What is death?" by focusing on the individual is blinkered. It restricts attention to a narrow zone around the individual body of a creature. Instead, how expansive is the answer we receive when we look at the context of death within the biosphere. Death now is tied to all of life, via the atmosphere and ocean. Death supports the awesome biological enterprise of making abundant the green and squiggly life. Talk about death has headed us straight into a contemplation of life, not only individual life, but big life, life on a global scale. Death and life are neatly dovetailed by the supreme cabinetmaker of evolution. Again, the crucial feature is not the death of any one creature per se, but rather what is done with death. To reach into the meaning of death, we must reach out into the wider context of which death is a part. "What Is Death? examines the phenomenon of death from organic, personal, and social points of view. It sheds light upon the life spans of creatures and the role of cell death in bodily health; contemplates the links among the personal confrontation with death, our brain, and consciousness; and probes the customs and rituals that surround death in various cultures."--Jacket In the winter of 1997, biologist and critically acclaimed science writer Tyler Volk began suffering from mysterious physical ailments that would bring him face to face with his own mortality. This experience led him to explore what death means to us - and to discover that our mortality is, paradoxically, extraordinarily life affirming. A leading developer of Gaia theory introduces a cosmology of death: a comprehensive explanation of the crucial role that death plays in the processes of life in its many forms - biological, sociological, and psychological. A recent Christmas Eve party found me at my sister's home in New Jersey.