Death
Death is the end of an organism's life. It is the irreversible cessation of biological functions that sustain a living organism. Entropy, nature's tendency toward disorder, can contribute to the breakdown of living systems over time. Upon death, organisms stop exhibiting behavior and generally begin to decompose through various physical and chemical processes. Death can occur at any stage of development, including in infancy. A person may experience clinical death that is reversible, resulting in some cases in a near-death experience. In humans, establishing death of the brain determines that an individual has irreversibly died.
Natural selection of organisms which successfully pass on their genes to the next generation drives life to engage in a struggle for existence against death. Because of this, living things, including humans, normally fear death and have strong instincts to avoid it. Some organisms may kill other organisms, causing them to die through herbivory, predation, or parasitism in order to take resources from the bodies of other organisms into their own. Organisms can also kill others through competition, in which they struggle with each other for control of external resources. Sometimes, organisms will take resources from organisms which have already died, either through scavenging or decomposition. However, despite the widespread instinct to survive, sometimes animals may commit suicide, being intentionally self-caused death, which in humans may be attributed to a variety of risk factors including mental illness. Besides intentional killing, organisms can die due to failure to secure necessary resources such as starvation or dehydration, or through harmful physical factors such as natural disasters or diseases. Organisms that do not die for these reasons usually succumb to death from old age; however, some organisms, such as the immortal jellyfish, are biologically immortal while still being able to die from other causes. Organisms have varying life histories, with differing life spans between species. Death affects populations of organisms, with selective pressures resulting in organisms with traits that are unfavorable in a given environment to die off; changes to an environment such as climate change or invasive species can cause entire ecosystems to die at higher rates than usual. As opposed to intentional suicide, sometimes species will commit evolutionary suicide in which existing adaptations lead to the deaths of all of their members. When all individuals of a clade have died, that clade is said to be extinct. Extinction events are periods of time when rates of extinction on Earth result in global loss of biodiversity due to mass death within many species worldwide.
As human beings have evolved the mental faculties to be aware of death, knowledge of death is a central part of the human condition and therefore is universal to human culture. Knowledge of death has motivated the development of a variety of religious, spiritual, ethical, and legal methods for understanding and responding to it. Many cultures have a concept of the survival of individuals after death, whether in an afterlife, as spirits, or through reincarnation. While such dualistic notions of survival past death are common to the world's major religions, other monist forms of thought such as materialism and physicalism generally maintain that death is the irreversible end of personal identity. Some societies have taboos on the dead, whereby information about a person who has died is censored. To avoid death, people have sometimes sought to achieve immortality, or eternal life, such as through cryogenics. Once a person has died, their community will generally perform funerary rituals to process the cadaver and honor the decedent according to practices specific to their culture. If a person is understood to have most likely died without direct evidence, they can be legally declared dead in absentia in many countries. Surviving people close to a decedent normally experience grief, a set of powerful mental and emotional processes associated with the loss of the person. For a human being to kill another is called homicide, an act that has profound legal implications in most societies. Homicide considered unjustified is known as murder, and is generally considered one of the most serious crimes in any society. However, states claim a monopoly on violence by which they may legally kill people, whether as punishment for crimes, through police violence, or through war. The study of death is known as thanatology.
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