It's avoided by human cancer cells and by human germ line cells. The cellular machinery and organelles of human beings have been working as least as long as there have been humans.
I’m perplexed by these statements, js1138. I don’t know whether to read them as if they were simply discrete facts, or whether you intended me to discover some meaning from the way the two statements correlate. If the latter, then the sense I get is you’re saying that ultimately, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between organisms that avoid senescence and those that do not. And yet for you to say that the “cellular machinery and organelles of human beings have been working as least as long as there have been humans” rather ironically (considering the source) suggests that evolution has had no role to play in the increasing complexity of cellular machinery and organelles, that whatever influenced the development of these systems, it was in place at once, in the “beginning.” Which is to make the case for William’s IC/AP argument, and its centerpiece, meta-information. You cannot have wanted to do that.
Perhaps the explanation for organisms that avoid senescence is really very simple: They are so relatively “simple” themselves that there’s little to “senesce.” At any rate, such organisms can probably be classified according to the algorithmic complexity requirements at Level (iii) of the AC/IP model. Why you think we can get exhaustive information about the astronomically more complex living systems described at Level (iv) (and above) from the Level (iii) information is beyond me. I figure it must be some kind of Darwinian prejudice.
Darwin’s theory is an incremental build-up from the “bottom,” i.e., from Levels (i) and (ii). The presupposition is that evolution bottoms out in chemistry, as “shaped” by “blind” random mutation and natural selection. And the theory’s fundamental assumption would appear to be that “the biological ‘whole’ is merely the sum of its parts” at any given point in the evolutionary development. This being the case, deal with the simplest “part” you can imagine — say, the single-celled organism — and extrapolate from that to a description of all the other "parts."
But to me, this procedure will not work. For the disparities in necessary information, of algorithmic complexity, between the simplest and the most complex organisms — many, many orders of magnitude difference between them — militates against this expectation.
Certainly, one cannot speak about biological functions in [the] case of chemical evolution. I note that this point requires ramifications in the context of the problem of continuity of life with the apparently inanimate world, as many scientists [have] suggested; e.g. Editorial, 2007, “The meaning of “life,” Nature 447, pp. 1031–1032.To get to the point Dr. Grandpierre was making here, let’s do a “thought experiment” in which we “reduce” both a high-entropy entity — a rock — and a low-entropy entity — a rabbit — to their physical and chemical constituents. We will do this by mercilessly pounding on these two entities with a heavy cudgel, repeatedly as necessary. Eventually (this would take longer for the rabbit than the rock), both are “reduced,” not only to atoms, but more significantly, to their fundamental constituent sub-atomic “particles.” We are now (figuratively speaking) in the quantum world — in Fig. 4, this is represented as underlaying Level (i). The point is, all existents in nature ultimately “boil down” to the quantum level, which is wholly undeterministic. It is pure, i.e., “unformed,” potentiality. SO: What “determines” whether the “quantum possibilities” are to express as rock or rabbit?
— A. Grandpierre, “Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life,” Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution, World Scientific, 2008;, p. 600.
The point seems to be: It is not the “matter” itself that makes them one type of thing or another; it is the information that specifies them.
In closing, just a little extra something to think about:
… [West-Eberhard, in] “Gaps and Inconsistencies in Modern Evolutionary Thought” … (2003, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, Oxford University Press) [presents] a whole list of basic problems of evolutionary theory…. It becomes more and more clear that Darwinian theory is so logically flabby it can “explain” anything by subtly changing the terms of the debate. Evolutionary theory can show only that systems of functions may evolve in a changing environment, but does not explain how an individual cell selects from the astronomically large domain of biological possibilities. Evolutionary theory concerns only the historical life forms appearing on the earth. It considers only a part of biological phenomena, instead of working out the general theory of biological processes and deriving the more special phenomena from the more general laws as it is possible in physics. In contrast, the theoretical biology of Ervin Bauer established the most universal law of biology in an exact manner which is quite compatible with the exactness of physics. These arguments indicate that selection is not the cause but the result of biological organization. Therefore, ultimately, the [bird’s] flying instinct, together with the phenomenon of evolution, is based on the Bauer principle. — ibid., p. 602. Emphasis added.