I feel like this is obvious. Eventually dying of all the weird body failures doesn’t inhibit your ability to procreate, but if you cannot survive alcohol or other various poisons you’ll never make it to a fertile age.
Basically every flavor compound in an herb or spice we eat is a poison directed at insects, microbes, or other creatures. (much less every medicinal or psychoactive compound found in nature)
This is common in evolutionary algorithms anyway so it's notable we don't see it in nature, at least not in the form of extended lifespan perhaps measured by average lifetime heart beats. It's easy to imagine a world where nature might want to keep the alpha lion around longer than the others so it can have more offspring, for example.
There is, if there were no advantage a whole lot more species would die immediately after reproduction like the octopus.
Many simpler organisms are vaguely immortal.
>It's easy to imagine a world where nature might want to keep the alpha lion around longer than the others so it can have more offspring, for example.
The utility of genetic diversity puts a lot of pressure against this.
I didn't just meant extending lifespan, I meant extending the time an individual is fertile.
> The utility of genetic diversity puts a lot of pressure against this.
High levels of elitist selection lowers diversity and can have a negative impact on a population's adaptive ability, but there is a sweet spot to diversity. Maximally diverse is just noise after all.
A small amount of elitism is generally what you would expect to be selected for, and we certainly see this other forms in most creatures, but never in the form of extended life span. That makes me suspect there's probably something fundamentally difficult about extending an organism's lifespan given our biological architecture and that's why evolution has favoured other forms of elitist selection.