A Tiger Dies and Leaves Its Skin Behind
A person dies and leaves a name behind. I’ve been thinking about this saying a lot lately.
I want to leave my name behind. I want those who knew me personally to remember me as a person of good character, and those who didn’t to remember me as an engineer, entrepreneur, and creator who made the world a better place.
At the same time, I realize how hard it is to leave a name behind. Of the more than a hundred billion people who have walked this earth, how many can you name?
Not long ago, I became captivated by the songs of a singer who had died young and listened to nothing else for days. The singer had never married and had no children. From a biological perspective, an organism’s greatest success is to leave as many copies of its genes, or something like them, in the world as possible. Conversely, an organism that leaves no offspring has failed. By that measure, the singer was a failure.
But was he really? Even now, long after his death, I listen to his songs. His creations have outlived him and continue to be enjoyed by countless people. His music comforts us and gives us the strength to face another day.
Helping people who share my values live happier lives—that is what I mean by “leaving my name behind.” From a broader perspective, it is also a way of passing on my genes. It may not be as exact a copy as biological reproduction, but it can reach far more people and endure indefinitely.
Reproduction is now just one of many ways to pass on genes. We can see evidence of this in how modern nations are changing. The ultimate form of a nation is a community of people who share the same values, not the same race. The boundaries between nations once drawn along racial lines are blurring with globalization; now ideas and ideologies bring people together. In God We Trust: because of its unique history, the United States was the first country to approach this ultimate form.
Bonds forged through shared values can sometimes be stronger than bonds of blood. We often see people join forces with someone of a different race who shares their ideology, then stand against—and even point guns at—people of their own race. Evolutionary biology, with the preservation of genes as its first principle, struggles to explain such behavior. Or perhaps one day, when genetic research has advanced far enough, we’ll discover that the human values we thought too abstract to be encoded in a sequence of bases are, in fact, inscribed in broad patterns across our DNA. If so, the flourishing of a group that shares the ideals I support could truly count as a biological success, just as much as having sons and daughters of my own.
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