The price of Complexity

I lead another book club at Rust Sanctuary (see sidebar or this post for details). Many times something from one of those books kind of relates to something from evolutionary psychology, and vice versa. Right now we are reading The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough, a biologist. She has a chapter called "Multicellularity and Death," and it got me thinking about stuff Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate.

Goodenough says that with multicellularity, we got very interesting, complex bodies that engage in sex, but we also got the death of the "soma," which is the body without the germ cells. Germ cells have a single set of chromosomes that get to go mate with another set of chromosomes, thus ensuring the immortality of some of the genes in those chromosomes. Amoebae and bacteria usually divide and are immortal. She says the price one pays for immortality is that the organism is not very complex.

Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. 

Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. 

... we arrive at one of the central ironies of human existence. Which is that our sentient brains are uniquely capable of experiencing deep regret and sorrow and fear at the prospect of our own death, yet it was the invention of death, the invention of the germ/soma dichotomy, that made possible the existence of our brains.

My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death.   

Which just reminds us that everything in biology, like everything in life, is a trade-off. It reminds me of a trade-off Pinker talked about in The Blank Slate. Obviously, we wish we could always get along with mates, family, and everyone else, but there is a flip side to the suffering we endure in human conflict. Pinker explains that, if one's mate and oneself were so similar that they could live in absolute perfect harmony, it would be more like two genetically identical cells in one body (or maybe two bees in a hive?) than like a human couple:

Heart cells and lung cells don’t have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony … There would be no falling in love … You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that’s the point: you don’t really love yourself, you are yourself. The two of you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology.

The same is true for our emotions toward family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. 

In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.

And this is because

Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the rare and unpredictable things we need.