[VadeRetro]

Some class notes on the subject I found a year or two back helped clear up a lot for me. The "For Dummies soundbite" answer is that after you reproduce yourself a few times, you personally are irrelevant because there are other copies of your genes out there.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the article!

It was very interesting. It takes a “looking back” position to explain why aging evolved. And it offered a few specific theories and predictions. From the article:

Why are we born, only to suffer and die? Because those who suffered and died in the past outreproduced those who didn't

If selection and adaptation were perfect, it would give us organisms that begin reproducing right way, keep doing it continuously, producing an infinite number of offspring, and living forever. But this isn't possible; there are both physical constraints- can't reproduce infinite amount. But even before you hit obvious physical constraints, there are biological trade-offs, e.g. if produce too many offspring, increase chances of dying

Do you have a link to a “forward looking” explanation? - that is, an explanation of why a mutation which caused aging would have been selected from the earliest.

The above article left it as a survival thing, that if predation is such that all are killed in x amount of time, then an aging gene would be coincidentally selected. But that doesn't help to explain how such a phenomenon could arise across all species with different ages and effects.