Aging may be a program, not a breakdown

Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.

You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...

a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.

[1] Their risk of death does not increase after reaching adulthood. I.e. every year after adulthood has the same risk of unexpected death. Humans and other animals that age have their risks of death climb in "old" age.

OTOH, you'd accumulate uncurable disease, injuries, etc as well. Maybe you become a disease resevoir inside your own growing family. Or you pass on as-yet-unknown genetic anomalies that are unhelpful, and you do so forever.

Granted that's a modern take, and in particular a modern rpg-like take. Regardless though getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward if natural selection is driving "forward".

I don't know how the antagonistic pleiotropy theory is doing. If true it would be a satisfactory explanation from an evolutionary point of view but I recall that it had some problems.

Otherwise I don't find the other evolutionary explanations of programmed aging to be satisfactory, especially when you consider that genes are selfish and act on the individual rather than population level.

Perhaps reproductive aging (egg quality) is the ultimate limiter, and then overall aging is adaptive downstream of that because hunter-gatherer families benefit (in terms of evolutionary fitness) from fewer old people to increase the percentage of people at reproductive age? That would fit the modern evidence of early egg freezing significantly increasing reproductive success in older women, showing that the problem of fertility decline by age is primarily cellular.

Or perhaps the aging mechanism is leftover from pre-human ancestry and there simply wasn't enough time in our evolutionary history for humans to evolve longer lifespans, maybe because it's slightly helpful but not nearly as helpful as other traits like intelligence, and lifespan is hard to improve via genetic adaptation due to bottleneck effects?

I wonder if people are familiar with the hypothesis of parasite-driven aging.

Parasites are vastly more prevalent than most people in modern, sanitary, medicated societies realize. Studies show that over half the biomass in a region may be parasitic.

Parasite frequently keep the host alive, but inhibit reproduction. This leaves the host alive, and competing with healthy members of its species for resources, but no capable longer reproducing. It's evolutionary dead weight.

Death is basically "turning it off and on again", just as you would do with a computer, and for very similar reasons. It clears the accumulated parasites and starts fresh.

This would also help explain why death is strongly conserved.

For example, if you go through some events in your childhood, they may stick with you until your death, as an inevitable part of you. Sure, treatment helps, but probably some memories you can't just erase.

Recycling things into a next generation, with probably better living conditions seems like generally pretty positive thing.

Also, some time you'd probably start to stop learning, not necessarily due to brain aging and neuron death, but simply because of basic architecture of our brain and how information solidifies and it starts to become more difficult to learn new things. We are a little more bored of most things and a lot of mystery and wonder diminishes somewhat.

Each galaxy and any planets/life it contains are just artifacts of an "existence run." That's why life feels like a simulation so often (and human history repeats itself): we're inside of an organic (human word) "program" that's trying to perfect itself by running similar, but consistently tweaked "logic" over and over. Things like evolution are just an algorithm embedded in the system.

If the theory discussed in the article is correct, then aging is (in the scope of the above thought) just one program among several that we interpret as existence/life.

Just a daydream but fun to think about.

Also relevant to the article is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...

Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try