Atheists - Does "evolution" stop when you die?

Question

Why should all life have evolved to terminate?

Answer 1

All animals - except christians - terminate when they die. Why would god do that? HHHMMM. Unless there really is a doggy heaven, and I learned for years in catholic school that there wasn't a doggy heaven. Gosh maybe life really is its own reward.

Answer 2

Evolution applies only to a species, an indivdual does evolve to begin with, which is adapted better to survive, and so lives and passes on its genetic material. If you are dead, you cannot reproduce, so cannot evolve. All live has evolved to terminate, as, not only is it impossible to live forever, the world is only so big, too many people living here would be problematic.... Plus, don't just ask us Atheists, most christians belive it now, due to it being true, but belive God has done it..Actually its not really evolution then is it. Godolution...

Answer 3

1) Not everybody who accepts evolution is an atheist

2) A species where individuals didn't have a limited natural lifespan wouldn't survive anyway. The population would breed to point where food sources and other resources would be depleted, so in the end they'd end up dying from starvation instead of old age. There's no biological advantage, on the population level (which is how evolution is really observed), to immortality.

3) To say evolution "stops" when you die is like saying gravity "stops" when a falling object hits the ground. It's not a case of either of these sciences "failing to work".

Answer 4

Life has no purpose, so it doesn't evolve to terminate. However, deaths of individuals help evolution continue.

From a life perspective, as long as life is happening, then individual organisms are simply elements of the entire process. Life got going in a difficult environment, and in order for it to continue when the environment shifted, it had to change, i.e., evolve.

An individual organism is unable to do such changing, but as new generations come along and are mutated, some of them will be better able to withstand the changes in the environment, thereby increasing the likelihood of the species continuing.

^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^

Answer 5

Reproduction and continued changing of genetics within a population are very positive traits for evolution. Things like viruses can change within a year due to the immense amount of reproduction (life cycle). That is why longer life hasn't evolved yet. But humans have started living a lot longer due to both genetics and medicine.

Answer 6

hahaha!

Do you know what evolution actually means?
It's ok to not know, and you should always seek knowledge, so here is some knowledge.

Evolution 101:
The definition
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.

The explanation
Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.

The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, just as you and your cousins share a common grandmother.

Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.
1. Traits in a population vary among individuals
2. Some traits are passed on to offspring (i.e.
traits have a genetic basis and are heritable)
3. Some individuals produce more offspring than
others
4. The subset of all offspring that survive are
those that possess certain traits; these traits
are “naturally selected”

• Fitness: the ability of an individual to
produce fertile offspring, relative to that
ability in other individuals.
– This is a measurable quantity, and allows us to
define adaptation
• Adaptation: a heritable trait that
increases the fitness of an individual
relative to individuals lacking that trait.
– These are time and location (environmentally)
dependent

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

Answer 7

I think you misunderstand evolution. One person does not evolve within themselves, we as a species evolve as we pass on beneficial genetic mutations to the next generation.

Life didn't evolve to terminate, we just have yet to evolve to live forever.

Answer 8

Individual organisms do not evolve, so their death is relevant to the evolution of their species only because they may die before or after they reproduce. It's called natural selection.

Answer 9

what? evolution is a natural proccess that on a microscopic bassis has been observed in fact how about MRSA (Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aereus) started off with just Staphylococcus aereus so how did the bugs become multi resitant to pennicillin based drugs, and some others, it is a form of SA but it has encoded protein modules that alow it to resist attack from antibiotics makeing it very hard to cure indeed. what happens is bugs die as a result of the antibotic some will survive and breed as a result they pass an imunity down to offsping its much quicker than macroscopic evolution (macroscopic=visable to naked eye) is much slower and much harder to model and so the religions cling to the hope it will remain unproven like that, but it will happen

Answer 10

Evolution cannot occur without death.

Evolution proceeds by natural selection, and natural selection is an astonishingly efficient and rapid selection system that works by weeding out genotypes that lead to organisms that do not survive (live) to reproduce.

Life after succesful reproduction is largely redundent in evolutionary terms, so there is no reason it should be long.