Apoptosis purifies a tissue from cells that became useless or even harmful for the organism.
Following the same logic, one may put a question about programmed death of an organism as a mechanism of purification of a kin, community of organisms, or population from individuals who became unwanted for this kin, etc. All of them are actuated by the appearance of phages inside the bacterial cell. This may be regarded as a precedent of phenoptosis which prevents expansion of the phage infection among E. coli cells. Purification of a population from infected individuals looks like an evolutionary invention useful for a species. Such an invention has high chances to be also employed by multicellular organisms.