Why does life avoid death?

It's a good question. I don't know the undoubtedly complex 'wet chemistry' answer but the 'Darwinist' answer would be that the ones that didn't avoid death all went extinct. I doubt that is the correct answer though.

Evolutionarily speaking, there are more basic survival mechanisms, like stimulus responses that incite the production of toxins as a defense, etc. Higher brain functions are not necessary.

It doesn't !

Life when living heads towards death. Slowly at times, other times rapidly. There is no avoidance, it's the planned grand finale. (At least for the physical being part of it)

Mind you, this does not mean sentient beings crave death, just that there's an instinctive knowledge that eventually it will happen, therefore live happily today as the rains of life soak you with happiness (which may appear to be a total avoidance of death).

That's exactly the correct answer.

More precisely, those organisms in a population that reproduce more effectively than others in the population (by avoiding death before reproducing) eventually dominate the gene pool for that population.

Porter Rockwell? How's your ol' Dannites getting along.

I think it is because we see what death is like under all the different circumstances. Don't want to get squished under a falling rock or killed by bullets and such. Same with animals. Bugs, I am not sure about, maybe they hear the fly swatter coming at them and they just want to get out of the way.

The production of toxins (as well as a plethora ... maybe two or three plethori) of other defense mechanisms is a method of avoiding being eaten, not a cause for not wanting to be eaten in the first place.

But you may have put me onto an idea. If a stimulus -- like the presence of a predator -- creates a toxin .... that could be interpreted as "avoiding being eaten" even though, as you said, no higher brain function is involved. (No higher brain is present.)

So, we have the many, many stimuli that could result in death creating many, many corresponding responses; the totality being summed up as "fear of death".

Interesting. I'll have to cogitate on that for a while.

Few people get the reference. Congratulations!

Ol' Port was once asked by a newspaper reporter if he had ever killed a man. Port replied, "Well ... I never killed anybody that didn't need killing."

Did you know that the Dannites took their name from the verse Genesis 49:17

Dan will be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, That bites the horse's heels, so that his rider falls backward.

By the way ... Port was never a big Dannite. He was Joseph's (and later Brigham's) personal shootist. The Dannites were more of a group of hooligans that Joseph and Brigham were too sophisticated to have much to do with.

More "avoidance mechanism" not the cause of the avoidance in the first place.

Not an answer.

You (and many, many others) keep missing the question.

WHY does life want to avoid getting killed? Not "how" but "why".

I've been cogitating. Here's a thought experiment:

Take a single celled organism to simplify the concept. Evolution may have created a “predator present–create toxin” stimulus–response pair in this organism. But suppose a highly specific toxin – specific and deadly to the single celled organism that the organism has never encountered before – is suddenly introduced to the environment of the organism. The organism will do nothing to avoid it.

No fear of death there!

Its not my fault that the thread title is misleading. Get a try in there and I will revise my previous post...idiocy everywhere sheeesh !

And that is why I said I didn't think 'evolution' is the correct answer. In the example of releasing a toxin in response to a threat, it is a highly complex chain of detection of a specific threat, communication to a mechanism for making the toxin, storage of the toxin, mechanism for directing the release of the toxin, etc. , each step of which is complex in itself. It's just too much gratuitous design to attribute to random mutation.

The 'fear of death' or 'desire of survival' and the millions of mechanisms for reacting to that desire had to be baked into the cake from the get-go.

No it didn't.

This is "The eye is to complicated to have evolved." argument in a different form. (A favorite of evolution deniers.) Evolution can easily handle the complexity of the job.

And an attack on evolution is not helpful in resolving the question.

Oooooh, Snapish...

Thanks for the correction and additional detail.

I thought my answer implied the "why". Seems fear is inbred into our conscience as well as in animals and maybe bugs.

Why don't you think it's a good answer? What exactly about it doesn't work for you?