The gene trumpet

It's difficult to consider that I am expendable. On purely biological terms, this is quite true. Our bodies, these complex beautiful machines of skeleton and muscle and neuron and eyes and intestines etc. are leaves of the great deciduous tree of life. They are expendable, falling off and shrivelling up while the genes that constitute them continue their individaully aimless march of existence. A body is a gene's way of making more genes. And if this sounds like "a chicken is just an egg's way of making more eggs", it isn't.

We'd love immortality, but we can't have it. What makes it more frustrating is that parts of our bodies, at least potentially, are immortal. Our germ-line cells, our sperm and ova, form a line back to the first thing that ever lived. And, if we succeed at reproducing, they will go on and partake in the great genetic dance, metaphorically bumping and jostling other competing genes for their place in endless posterity. Odd to think of the maddening complexity of bodies as just machines that survive for the sake of preserving genes.

Obviously, that's not the whole story, but there's no time ot get into that now.

Consider: "biology is a good compromise of a science: not as technical as chemistry, and not as profound as physics."