they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.

"Thermodynamic evolution" says that sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. Yes, I do think we're more clever than that.

> sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice.

That's not what I'm saying. Sick kids dying is not the same as old people living and holding social/economic/positional/etc capital into perpetuity.

And further, what I'm saying is about "us" as a larger living system, at coarse-grain scale. We each live at fine-grained scale. Negotiating truths and values between those is the fuckin work of being alive. Bluntly, some might reasonably ask: who wants you individually to be happy and surrounding by family if your society/culture trends toward failure? That's not me saying "I don't care about you" (I do!) but it's me pointing out that there are fuzzy lines when negotiating values across scales.

Death is part of our thriving and a part of us ("us" in the Gaian sense) at the largest coarse-grain scale, though it hurts like hell at the fine-grain one