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:
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
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.
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.
Some senescence mutations would be almost as old as life itself and thus very ancient and very general. The kind of factors they talk about in that link start operating as soon as mutation and natural selection do.
It is basically enough that you can get away without living forever if you reproduce a lot. Recall that the optimum strategy--other things being equal, but especially if your personal odds are not good--is to reproduce as much as possible as early as possible and get "compound interest." Be prolific, die young; you still win.
Living absolutely forever wouldn't really hurt, but it's irrelevant. It's never been selected. Living somewhat longer can be selected (recall the birds and turtles) where predation is luxuriously light, but enough reproduction eventually happens to take the pressure of natural selection to ineffective low levels for older individuals.
So there are a lot of things--not just a few--in your genome that tend to make you come unraveled over time. You might think it's important, but in fact it has never mattered. Evolution, as Dawkins likes to point out, is about genes, not individuals.