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Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

> Evolution has had billions of years to do it, and for whatever reason the conclusion is that either it's not possible, or the cost is not worth it.

To be fair, in the "eyes" of evolution, once you stop breeding, you are effectively dead weight and a resource sink - there's been no benefit to evolving hyper-age solutions. I guess mayflies are the ur-example here - they grow, they breed once, they die and leave all the resources to the new crop.

Even if you kept breeding, as your age goes up, your ability (absent modern medicine and luxuries) to get your children to breeding age goes down (a 20 year old has a much better chance against a sabre-tooth tiger / flu / cold weather / etc. than a 70 year old...)

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There is some thought that social animals that live past their breeding age still play a role in passing on their genes by increasing the fitness of their relations. For example, by helping your sibling's offspring pass on their genes, you are effectively helping pass on roughly 25% of your genes. I don't totally know where I read this but I'm pretty sure it's in selfish gene by Richard Dawkins.

This is pretty rare in nature, however. There are very few species that live past reproductive age, I think humans and cetaceans are the only ones who do it.

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons". — Douglas Adams

Makes a ton of sense, doesn't it. We're attributing our preferences - biological, cultural, etc. - to the good stuff, then later on "discover", piece by piece, that we're not that special. I know many truly intelligent people who do feel humans are special and it's been blowing my mind for decades

I’m not so sure this is the case. Older humans have societal roles that free time and resources for younger humans to breed more and work more so the group has more resources. The invention of grandparents was a big thing for our ancestors.

And this is exactly why we don’t drop dead right after we have kids. We are optimized to stay alive and support our our offspring until they have the highest chance of survival and reproduction (and maybe their kids?) so 20+20+10?

Nowadays people don’t have kids until 30, so maybe there is some pressure towards 30+30+10?

Women outlive their reproductive years (and men too!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis

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