Found Poem Poem by Janelle Farvour

Living things have always died because of mishaps
such as starvation or injury.

But there's another sort of death in which cells
and perhaps
controversially
even whole organisms choose annihilation
because
of the benefits it brings to some greater whole.

In other words, death is an evolutionary strategy.

It is most obvious
in the many varieties
of programmed cell death.

Or the result
of the self-destruct mechanism
found
in every multicellular organism.

My hand has five fingers
because the cells that used to live between them
died
when I was an embryo.

Most evolutionary biologists reject the idea of an innate 'death program'.
After all,
they point out,
animals die of old age in many different ways, not by
one
single
route
as apoptotic
cells
do.

Instead, they view senescence as a sort of evolutionary junkyard: natural selection has little reason
to get rid of flaws that appear late in life,
since few individuals are lucky enough to make it to old age.

But now that people routinely survive well past reproductive age,
we suffer
the invention evolution
never meant us to find: death by old age.