[Dataman]

My agile and ageless mind disguises the decrepitude of my body.

How do you guys account for the slow downhill slide of the human over 30? The younger we are, the greater our immunity and strength. The body is self-reparing and actually improves itself till about age 19. Why does it stop improving at all? If we continue to exercise and provide an adequate diet, why do we deteriorate?

It would seem that the ever-present urge to live would have had enough time to hammer out a longer lifespan and that decline should start at maybe age 55 instead of 19. There just doesn't seem to be a good reason that we should die of old age.

Another aging problem is that organs and systems tend to wear out at the same time. IOW, if your spleen is failing and you haul it to the hospital for repair, it won't be long until your liver fails or your heart or your brain. Even your bones, muscles and blood vessels fail at about the same time. The body seems to have a universal self-destruct code built in to it.

Even more perplexing to evolutionists should be why dogs only get to live about 10 years and humans get about 75. Dogs have been evolving longer and have 7 times more generations (and even more offspring) than man, theoretically giving the dog the evolutionary edge.

[VadeRetro]

You're lapsing into medvedian strawmanning. "By every precept of Darwinism, the skies should be full of feral chickens."

A Good Web Page on Senescence.

[js1138]

One only has to live long enough to reproduce. In the case of humans, about 15 years (plus a few folks have to live to 30 or so to raise the kids, but anything past 35 is superfluous). Dogs would only have to live a couple of years if a high percentage of their offspring survived, but a longer lifespan gives them several shots at having surviving offspring. Wild dogs probably don't live longer than five years, on the average.

[gomaaa]

AS js1138 pointed out so well, we only need to live long enough to reproduce. REPRODUCTION is all that counts in evolution. There is no other measure of "superiority". Sure it would be dandy if we could live 500 years, but it doesn't take us that long to propogate our genes. Mayflys live only a day, but they reproduce like mad, hence they are an evolution success story.