For my money, the best regular football commentary on the web (or anywhere, really) is Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. I’ve been reading TMQ since it began on Slate, through its all-too-short residence at espn.com, the brief sojourn at footballoutsiders.com and now in its new location at nfl.com. The highlight of his column, however, is often the non-football entries, as Easterbrook writes persuasively (sometimes) and intelligently (almost always) on subjects ranging from environmental policy to the space program to religion. I don’t share any of Easterbrook’s religious beliefs, but I do like to read about religion. In this week’s column TMQ provided an example of the sorts of things that strengthen his faith:
TMQ is a churchgoer who believes there are higher powers and a life to come, but since the Bible tells us nothing about what the afterlife may be like, I don’t pretend to know details. I can note, however, that the dying in many places having similar mental experiences is not “impossible” absent the supernatural. There may be a perfectly natural reason why people facing mortality see hallways of peace or wisdom: because that is what culture conditions people to expect on death. (Let’s hope it’s right!) As for the bright lights the dying sometimes report experiencing,
this article by Brendan Koerner explains mundane physical theories. Among them are that brain anoxia, or oxygen depravation, causes the optic nerves to sense white; and that at death the body releases all stored endorphins (no need to keep saving them) to stop mortal agony and create a sense of peace, making dying less traumatic.
The latter biological possibility is actually one of the reasons TMQ believes that human beings were made by a God who loves us. Why would natural selection have cared about reducing a person’s trauma at death? All natural selection cares about is fitness in passing down genes; if after replicating its DNA an organism dies in pain or panic, what’s that to evolution? In Darwinian terms, there would be no “selection pressure” favoring the peaceful death over the horrible death. Yet there appear to be biological mechanisms that help most people die peacefully. Why are such mechanisms in our physiologies? Maybe because somebody loves us.
It is nice to see that as a sign of divine intervention. It provides Easterbrook solace and, well, bully for him. I’d like to find solace also, and I won’t begrudge him his. But I think that he goes awry when he says that there is no evolution-driven reason for the body to release all of its endorphins upon death. I concede that a dying creature is unlikely to reproduce, and so any strictly death-related adaptations would not be reproductively successful adaptations and would therefore not be expected to ripple through the entire population. But isn’t Easterbrook looking too narrowly?
The body releases endorphins in response to extreme pain and extreme stress. It does this even when the body isn’t in the process of dying. This is precisely the type of trait that would respond to selection pressure. Endorphins may encourage a person to keep fighting to survive, to make post-trauma recovery easier or to allow people a clearer head to make better decisions in high-stress times. All of these things would allow a person to soldier on to breed another day. This is a blunt instrument, however. Death probably feels to the body, more or less, like an extremely high-pain, high-stress event. Just the sort of thing that would cause your brain to fire off all endorphin cannons in a futile, last-ditch effort to survive.
In any event, when you die you also shit your pants. Another sign of the divine?
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The Lord speaks in mysterious ways
