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Comment by Jebdm | Hacker News Reader

"Evolution has almost exclusively adopted destructive aging processes in every form of life on the planet. The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way."

I'd say it's pretty obvious, although I'm no biologist: natural selection doesn't "care" how long you live, as long as you live long enough to have (and possibly raise) kids.

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If you live too long you take resources away from your offspring.

Sure, but I don't think this effect is enough to be significant to most evolutionary processes, especially if (and I believe this is the idea) in aging you don't become feeble. As long as there are enough resources to go around, there isn't a big problem, especially since people are resources themselves.

(If this weren't the case, you would think that evolution would drive us to die shortly after we had children, or at least after we lost our ability to have children.)

Most species have far more limited resources than we do (ie. that we have created for ourselves recently), and they exist in some sort of equilibrium. If old members of the population live longer, then the group will run short on resources and some will starve. If the old are not feeble and they don't die more than the young, then evolution will slow and the population as a whole will be less able to adapt to a changing environment over time.

Is this effect significant or not? I don't think we can guess at these types of things. Subtle changes in a complex system are hard to predict.

Natural resources aren't finite in any meaningful economic sense. Even in a physical sense, the upper bounds are huge. And, most important, most people are net producers; the longer they live, the more they produce.

The longer life expectancies are, the less offspring you have. Seems like a natural counterbalance.

The fewer offspring you have, the less adaptable the species becomes.

Depends on technological developments. Why should the individual survival machine care about the adaptability of the species as a whole?

People tend to care for their offspring. Humans do it longer than almost anything else.

If your statement was true, death wouldn't be so wide spread. Clearly, evolution is very opinionated on the matter.

No; the default is decay (as we see from the second law of thermodynamics), and we would have to explicitly inhibit decay in order to stop death. There is no evolutionary incentive to stop death due to aging.

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