Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

A necessary component of the evolutionary process is that individuals eventually die so that their offspring can propagate new combinations of genes that eventually lead to adaptation by natural selection of new traits and new variations leading to the diversity of species. We must all die so that the new can blossom, explore, adapt, and evolve. Steve Jobs put it succinctly3: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Never thought of death like this before