[[And, in my view, the more interesting question is how and/or why the higher organisms are programmed to die. In evolution theory, how would “nature” select in favor of death by trial and error? What is the survival advantage of death?]]
Precisely- very good point- however, I think the coutnerargument will be that there had to be a ‘tradeoff’ between long life and reproduction- however, if hte amoeba were perfectly fine livng htier life merrily, and livign for very long times, it woudl seem that there woudl be nothign that would ‘push htem’ toward the ‘need to evovle’
But the coutnerargument will be that certain colonies of amoeba were pressured to ‘adapt or die’ and even htough other colonies in other parts of hte world were htriving, these particular amoeba had to adapt- and so on and so forth for billions of years until we got billions of species that all apparently evovled from lower species that simply couldn’t make a go of it in their particular environments and ‘needed to evolve’ to a higher species and compelxity.
[[To the Christian who “does” or at least follows science, the observation might underscore a spiritual understanding, i.e. that death was added after the fact of life, whether biological or spiritual. ]]
I was goign to mention this earlier- that it could be argued that the amoeba that live very long were carry-overs from the original creation where life was supposed to live eternal- all species.
It is understandable that in the presence of an inadequate food supply, a balance will result. Some will die from starvation until the balance is acheived.
And it is reasonable that some organisms might "kill off" competing organisms to survive.
But it is puzzling that an undirected process, natural selection, would lead to "programmed cell death."