Death is productive in ways that might never be comfortably acknowledged; the literal decay, disorder and functional dissonance of apoptosis, senescence into mortality, cultural and ideological churn and the diverse cyclic, pendular oscillations of adversarial political and tribal conflict which themselves invariably end in material or symbolic death of some kind.

If death (as much as its inversion of life) is a driver of biological, cultural and technological change, it is an example of the ways that emergent complexity maximally exploits all available entities, artefacts, information and energy sources.

The same endemic systemic entropy which incurs dissolution and decay provides the stochastic information (and energy) resource from which probabilistic novelty, random variation and the possibility for progressive, constructive evolution and exploratory (recombinatory) creativity emerges.