There are a lot of human languages that derive their word for “human” from their word for death (mard in the Iranian languages, e.g.) or birth (e.g. tlacatl in Nahuatl). The sense of finitude thus expressed may be taken as establishing a contrast with the nonhuman, i.e. the gods, a contrast that also gets topicalized for instance in the Greco-Roman distinction between mortal humans and immortal divinities. The gods do not die, or else the gods are not born.
So: do gods get to experience the thrill of Darwinian evolution? Presumably not: in Greek myth, for instance, in Hesiod’s Theogony, the gods multiply and expand to fill the universe, then stop. Within that framework, gods compete for power: Cronos overthrows Ouranos, Zeus overthrows Cronos, and various titanomachies or gigantomachies herald broader overturnings. You might also want to talk about Zeus’ differential reproductive success, but that works itself out precisely among mortal humans: because the gods don’t die, there’s no room for Zeus to repopulate heaven in his own image.
In cultures where that set of contrasts operates – human/mortal/born vs divine/immortal – non-Darwinian life hovers at the edge of the human imaginary, as a limit or goal to which certain remarkable humans – Hercules or Augustus, for example – might be able to assimilate themselves. At the same time, however, this form of life finds itself always in the crosshairs of a critical assault that, in the Greek tradition, would run from Xenophanes through Palaiphatus and Euhemerus to early Christian polemicists like Tertullian. Each of these thinkers would, in their own way, attack not the notion of godhood but the image of it which the mythographic tradition presented. They wanted to deny, not that there could be anything undying, but that something undying could count as life. That mythographic form of godhood was an impossibilty even for the gods, let alone for human beings.
This inherited tendency to understand the undying or unborn as an uncrossable threshold, incompatible with the human (and therefore the animal) condition, probably prepared the grounds for the emergence of a science of life in Europe. If we take Darwinian evolution as a biological fact, then, we have been able to integrate its earth-shaking claims about human origins just to the extent that we have already naturalized and universalized a born, dying form of life that could form a substrate for natural selection. Pockets of resistance to Darwinism remain, predictably, among religious groups that see their god or messiah or even their own “immortal souls” as involved in a form of undying life (which is not, by the way, the original position of Christianity or Islam.)
As modern Christian resistance to Darwinism suggests, there are certainly other ways of dividing up the world and thus other ways of conceptualizing life. One example that lies particularly close to my work at the moment is offered by the Manichaeans, who take an atomic approach to life by stipulating that only certain (“light”) particles within apparently living things are actually alive – the rest of the living creature being a kind of clothing of dead matter made by an evil demiurge in imitation of life. These particles of light, living by definition, survive the apparent death of their host and are either reincorporated into another organism or (if they happen to have been eaten by a Manichaean elect) sent up to the moon, whence they can follow a trajectory through the sun and out of the universe. On this model, life is actually indifferent to birth and death, which are events that happen around it but not to it.
This is an alternative bio-ontology that developed alongside mainstream Greco-Roman thinking on life, in the interstices between it and neighboring cultural commonwealths to the East. It perhaps still bears the trace of a “western” obsession with policing the lines between life and nonlife that is less apparent in the case studies collected in Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies, where, among Aboriginal Australians, persons pass in and out of the world without this necessarily corresponding to a birth or a death. Povinelli suggests that some such account of personhood for nonliving things – not as quasi-humans with rights, but as agents with which we can enter into a relationship of care, or not – will be essential to understanding how the anthropocene has placed limits to human “power” at the same time as it seems to represent the extension of that power over the face of the Earth.
There are people, probably including some of the originators of the anthropocene concept, who understand it in mythographic terms as a human “overthrowing” of nature to match Zeus’ triumph over Cronos, except that, in modern, rationalizing terms, we have to take care lest we actually manage to “kill” the life that nature is. The last 2 years of pandemic should have left us no illusions about this: it is rather we who have put ourselves into the power of a range of non-human agents, some living, some not, some – like this virus – uncannily shimmering between living and dead.
Evolution is a story of life outwitting life, a game that some species – or one species – can win by eliminating all rivals. Yet there are forms of life on Earth, articulated by cultures with different visions than our own, that happen to defy this Darwinian conception by refusing to die or be born. These, and not the impossibility of an immortal god, are what we now face on Earth in the anthropocene – an experience that may better prepare us to encounter life on other planets than do any of the stipulative definitions offered by biology.