The Genetic Book of the Dead — VIII. When the Dead Became Part of the Future

An organism is alive now.

But almost none of its organisation began now.

Its body carries inherited structures.

Its development unfolds through inherited organisation.

Its capacities have been shaped by generations of differential survival.

Its present is therefore crowded with consequences of events that happened long before it existed.

The genetic book of the dead is written into the living.

But perhaps book is too static a metaphor.

The past is not simply being carried forward.

It is operating.

Inherited organisation determines how development proceeds.

Development produces an organism with particular capacities.

Those capacities determine, in part, how the organism encounters its environment.

Those encounters create consequences.

Some of those consequences affect survival and reproduction.

And some differences are inherited by the next generation.

The sequence becomes:

ancestral history → inherited organisation → living activity → consequence → differential persistence → future inheritance.

The dead therefore enter the future without ever seeing it.

Their survival has altered the organisation inherited by organisms that did not yet exist.

Their failures matter too: forms that disappeared are absent from the future except insofar as their disappearance changed what remained possible.

Evolutionary history is thus not simply a record of what happened.

It is a history of which organisations became capable of having descendants.

That is what makes the genetic book so strange.

It is written by differential persistence.

It is read by development.

It is enacted by living organisms.

And it is continually extended by whatever happens to those organisms next.

The past becomes present as organisation.

The present becomes future through inheritance.

And the future, when it arrives, will contain consequences of a past that no longer exists.

The dead do not remain because they are remembered.

They remain because something they changed is still capable of becoming something else.

That may be the deepest meaning of the genetic book of the dead:

the past survives most powerfully not when it is preserved,

but when it has become part of the future.