Hardly, but it is an interesting take on why immortality (or rather, never-aging) among humans isn’t the preferred option:
On a strictly individual level, you’d assume that the immortals would do better than the mortals. After all, they remain healthy indefinitely, and they don’t have to worry about anyone else growing so sick or feeble that they become a burden. But Martins ran the simulation over many generations, and this meant the mortals had a chance to keep breeding. After all, the mortals had to keep reproducing, or else their population would die out.
As the environment changed, some of the mortal offspring were mutated or otherwise became better adapted to their surroundings. The mortals eventually became dominant over the immortals, who were increasingly ill-adapted to their altered environment. Worse, because most immortals still weren’t dying off, they had no room to reproduce and replace the now ill-adapted members with younger, potentially fitter children. (here)
The common philosophic concept is there – if humans lived forever, they would never evolve and humanity would one day cease to exist.
Then the LORD God said, “Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil. What if they reach out, take fruit from the tree of life, and eat it? Then they will live forever!” So the LORD God banished them from the Garden of Eden, and he sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made. (Gen 3:22-23 NLT)
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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