Earthly Immortality Fantasists Are Poor Scholars of the Human Body's Gigantic Fine-tuned Organization and Complexity

The Reuters news agency is 173 years old, and Reuters is about as reliable a mainstream news source as you can find. A recent news article published by Reuters is entitled "Hot Mic Picks Up Putin and Xi Discussing Organ Transplants and Immortality." It seems that when Vladimir Putin (the leader of Russia) recently met with Xi (the leader of China), a microphone picked up a conversation between them discussing the prospects of 150-year lifespans and earthly immortality. 

The article states this:

"As Putin and Xi walked toward the Tiananmen rostrum where they viewed the parade with Kim, Putin's translator could be heard saying in Chinese: 'Biotechnology is continuously developing.'

The translator added, after an inaudible passage: 'Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality.' 

In response, Xi, who was off camera, can be heard responding in Chinese: 'Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.' "

Later in the article we read this:

"Putin confirmed later that he and Xi had discussed the subject on Wednesday.

'I think when we went to the parade, the chairman talked about it,' Putin told reporters in Beijing when asked about the leaked conversation.

'Modern means of health improvement, medical means, even surgical ones related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue differently than it does today,' he said."

The statement of Xi is not objectionable. It is true that "some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old. " The statement from Putin's translator is a nutty-sounding one. It obviously is untrue that "the longer you live, the younger you become." That's the opposite of the truth, which is that the longer you live, the older you become. 

The article makes Putin sounds like an earthly immortality fantasist. The earthly immortality fantasist is one who thinks that breakthroughs in medical science will discover some way for a human to keep living on Earth indefinitely, with a lifespan of greater than 1000 years. 

The people who have such fantasies tend to be materialists, and they also tend to be very poor scholars of the human body and its enormous heights of physical organization and component interdependence and fine-tuned functional complexity. The more you study such topics, the less likely you will be to believe in the possibility of humans ever achieving physical immortality on this planet. The better you understand how there had to occur a thousand miracles of hard-to-achieve fine-tuning and accidentally unachievable component interdependence for there to exist a normal human lifespan, the less likely you will be to believe that human medicine will be able to reverse the endless types of biological deterioration that occurs as people age. Similarly, someone who does not understand the complexity of a jet aircraft might think that a few modifications might allow a jet aircraft to keep flying forever. 

Human bodies have enormously high levels of organization. A human body is built from organ systems and a skeletal system; organ systems are built from organs and other extremely complex components; organs are built from tissues; tissues are built from cells; cells are enormously complex units built from organelles; organelles are built from proteins and protein complexes;  protein complexes (often so complex they are called molecular machines) are built from various types of protein molecules; protein molecules are very special arrangements of hundreds or thousands of amino acids; and amino acids are built from about twenty atoms.   The human body has a more impressive degree of organization and complexity than any machines humans have ever manufactured. 

A long-standing characteristic of materialism and Darwinism is a failure to adequately describe the enormous organization and fine-tuned functional complexity of living organisms, and the huge interdependence of their parts. There is a reason why materialists and Darwinists have habitually tended to avoid describing the human body in a way that adequately depicts the enormous levels of organization in the human body.  The reason is that the better job you do at describing such organization, the less plausible materialism and Darwinism appear to be.  

The Darwinist materialist wants you to believe that human bodies arose because of blind accidental processes.  Most of us can intuitively realize a principle that I have called the first rule of accidental construction. In a previous post I defined that rule as follows:

The first rule of accidental construction: the credibility of any claim that an impressively organized final result was accidentally achieved is inversely proportional to the number of parts that had to be well-arranged to achieve such a result, and the amount of organization needed to achieve such a result.

I can illustrate the principle with a simple example. A person throwing some cards into the air might accidentally achieve a "house of cards" consisting of one card diagonally resting against another. But the larger the number of well-arranged cards, the smaller the chance that the result could be the work of chance. You might believe someone if he said he threw some cards into the air and produced a result like this by mere chance:

But you would be a fool if you believed someone who told you that he threw a deck of cards into the air, and it produced the result shown below (which would never be produced by chance even if 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times a deck of cards was thrown into the air). 

The more well-arranged parts something requires, and the greater the variety of the part types, and the greater the complexity and interdependence of the parts, and the higher the number of systems the thing requires, the less likely that thing could be the result of unguided processes. So because materialists want us to believe that human bodies arose from unguided processes, they tend to poorly describe the organization and functional complexity of human bodies. A materialist may say "you're just some meat" or "you're just some flesh" rather than correctly describing your body as a fine-tuned whole that is a set of enormously complex systems that are themselves built of enormously complex systems that are themselves built of enormously complex systems.

In the world of materialism you are constantly inhibited and steered away from engaging in proper scholarship of biological organization and biological complexity and the interdependence of enormously well-arranged biological components. This results in what we might call biocomplexity ignoramuses. And such biocomplexity ignoramuses may believe in the possibility of earthly immortality, which they may think is "not too much of a stretch." 

The idea of earthly immortality is utterly unbelievable. Human bodies look just like unfathomably complex systems that were deliberately designed to wear out and fail after about 70 or 80 years (with a slim possibility of a few decades more of earthly life). There are countless factors that limit the human lifespan. There are no little tweaks that will transform such bodies into systems that can live on Earth for centuries. 

A fundamental fact of biology limiting human lifespans is something called the Hayflick limit. The wikipedia.org article on the topic explains the concept well. A Nobel Prize winning scientist (Alexis Carrel) had maintained that human cells can reproduce pretty much endlessly. The scientist Leonard Hayflick did research refuting the idea. Hayflick showed that human cells can only reproduce about 50 or 60 times. The limit is called the Hayflick limit. 

There are about 200 types of cells in the human body. Many types of cells in the human body have limited lifespans. For example:

• Intestinal cells have a lifetime of only four days. 
• Skin cells only last days to weeks. 
• Fat cells only last about 8 years. 
• Liver cells only last about 10 to 16 months. 
• Pancreas cells only last about a year. 
• Red blood cells only last about 120 days. 
• White blood cells only last between hours and years. 

The Hayflick limit is one of many reasons why there is a built-in limit to the human lifespan. The main reason is that the human body is such a miracle of superbly arranged organization, intricate fine-tuning and just right biochemistry, dynamism and component interdependence  that there are endless opportunities for things to go wrong, and endless possibilities for gradual deterioration.  The longer a person lives, the smaller the chance of escaping the endless ways that superbly intricate and enormously fine-tuned systems in the human body can break down. Similarly, if a man plays Russian Roulette every year, firing a gun with 1 chance in 6 of killing him, then with each passing decade his chance of surviving will diminish.

The software industry has a great expression: "It's not a bug, it's a feature." We can say that about the limited human lifespan. But that limit should be no cause of concern for the person who has adequately studied the evidence for paranormal phenomena and life after death, the extremely many reasons for disbelieving that the human mind and human memory can be explained by the brain, and the very many reasons for thinking that we live in a purposeful universe in which  human beings are no accident of nature, but instead creatures who are here on purpose as part of some grand plan.  

The world's religions have very many diverse forms, and only some of them involve a belief in a deity. It was pointed out by anthropologist Clifford Geertz that you can have a religion without any belief in a deity. The communism of the Soviet Union in the 20th century was a kind of stealth religion, and its features met Geertz's anthropological definition of religion.  He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." In its transhumanist form today's Darwinist materialism seems to be clearly a religion, as I point out in my post " Transhumanism Puts the Finishing Touches on the Materialist Religion," which you can read here.  Below are features of the transhumanist form of Darwinist materialism, which are also hallmarks of organized religions (read the post for how all of these boxes are checked in the case of the transhumanist form of Darwinist materialism):

When self-described scientific thinkers start teaching an eternal life eschatology based on technological fantasies requiring poor scholarship about human bodies and human minds, it becomes all the more clear that we are dealing with a religion. That has funding consequences.  We are told that the US constitution prohibits any funding in support of a religion, but what about when the religion is a religion-in-all-but-name, a kind of stealth religion? Why should billions of federal dollars be going to support such a stealth religion, with no similar funding for religions that call themselves religions? As for the idea of a very old man being kept alive by receiving an  organ taken from a younger man, it is in general morally abhorrent, particularly whenever the donor did not die a natural death or whenever there are younger people waiting for transplants of the same organ. Medicine should be focused on allowing people to live full and happy lives to about the age of 70 or 80, rather than being focused on getting very old people to live to be older and older and older.