What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

Personally, I think it's there to kill off any organisms who haven't evolved to a changing environment and are not the strongest anymore.
Kind of like nature's bullet, live your life, run your course and you're done.

Well, aging is caused by the deterioration of body cells at the chromosome level, right? If that's the case, then aging would serve as an instinctual motivation to reproduce. It's just more efficient to start a new life with a single cell than to keep the trillions of body cells in an already living body in peak condition.

Booze Zombie:
What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

Personally, I think it's there to kill off any organisms who haven't evolved to a changing environment and are not the strongest anymore.
Kind of like nature's bullet, live your life, run your course and you're done.

No, not really, nature's bullet would be the changing environment itself, if they were able to survive in the changing environment, then they wouldn't need to be killed off. I agree with Eiseman, it provides an incentive to reproduce as well as simply being caused by other factors like your DNA and therefore cells simply becoming less and less efficient.

John Galt:

Booze Zombie:
What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

Personally, I think it's there to kill off any organisms who haven't evolved to a changing environment and are not the strongest anymore.
Kind of like nature's bullet, live your life, run your course and you're done.

No, not really, nature's bullet would be the changing environment itself, if they were able to survive in the changing environment, then they wouldn't need to be killed off. I agree with Eiseman, it provides an incentive to reproduce as well as simply being caused by other factors like your DNA and therefore cells simply becoming less and less efficient.

All things must die, even gods.

Anyway nothing can run forever, even the best cars need replacing in the end.

Knight Templar:

All things must die, even gods.

Anyway nothing can run forever, even the best cars need replacing in the end.

Unless you've got a fleet of nanobots constantly repairing cells and DNA. That works.

I think the question here is why does everything need to die?

From an evolutionary standpoint, there are pros and cons to aging. In one sense, if something (or someone, I'm thinking about cave-people at the moment, makes for a better example) reaches 40 or so, it shows they haven't been killed off by then so they are more likely to have 'better' genes. They haven't been killed off yet, ergo they must be worth mating with.

On the other hand, the human reproductive system tends to stop working at a certain point. This could be natural selection's way of saying 'yeah, you can have too much of a good thing'.

Personally, I don't think people have developed to live past 60. It's only through an reasonable amount of healthcare that someone past 80 can be sustained (at least in a good majority of cases).

Khell_Sennet:
Aging is the byproduct of the sun, at least as far as I see it. A lot of the symptoms of aging are parallel to radiation poisoning, such as organ failure, loss of hair, loss of sexual drive/ability, mutant superpowers... Now we're all stuck under the sun, which pumps rads into us our whole lives. Now if anyone wants to bury themselves deep underground and prove me wrong, more internets for me. : D

Damn sun! Let's destroy it. Wait, then we'll die for sure. But then if it exists, it's killing us! I have to think this one out.

Khell_Sennet:
Aging is the byproduct of the sun, at least as far as I see it. A lot of the symptoms of aging are parallel to radiation poisoning, such as organ failure, loss of hair, loss of sexual drive/ability, mutant superpowers... Now we're all stuck under the sun, which pumps rads into us our whole lives. Now if anyone wants to bury themselves deep underground and prove me wrong, more internets for me. : D

...Not quite. If the body replaced cells as fast or faster than they were killed off by radiation (which doesn't come exclusively from the sun, by the way) and programmed cell death, then aging would not occur.

The ultimate point of aging is to kill off an older generation to free up resources for a newer generation. This allows for more potentially beneficial mutations and, ultimately, a stronger gene pool.

Quoting Orson Scott Card (Best author evar) "God made us with death inside."

TheNecroswanson:
[ The ignorant change, or die. JEEZUS.

Reminds me of the Darwin awards

Has anyone read Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene"? It's a book which argues that, at it's most basic level, evolution is gene-centric. At any rate, one of the ideas which Dawkins puts forth in his book is that aging and death occur in order for newer, better copies of the genetic information of an organism to spread more widely.

Khell_Sennet:
Aging is the byproduct of the sun, at least as far as I see it. A lot of the symptoms of aging are parallel to radiation poisoning, such as organ failure, loss of hair, loss of sexual drive/ability, mutant superpowers... Now we're all stuck under the sun, which pumps rads into us our whole lives. Now if anyone wants to bury themselves deep underground and prove me wrong, more internets for me. : D

The solution? Wear more sunscreen.

aging is the effect of gravity constantly pulling down on out bodys

Booze Zombie:
What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

i don't believe that aging has anything to do with evolution.

BallPtPenTheif:

Booze Zombie:
What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

i don't believe that aging has anything to do with evolution.

I do. If we didn't age, we'd have run out of food a LONG time ago.

The_root_of_all_evil:

BallPtPenTheif:

Booze Zombie:
What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

i don't believe that aging has anything to do with evolution.

I do. If we didn't age, we'd have run out of food a LONG time ago.

but that's like saying that bullets serve a purpose in evolution. our ability to not age as fast and to buy more time to reproduce is a purpose towards evolution, not aging itself.

aging is just a hazard that occurs to all living things. it's a byproduct of existence not a function of it.

BallPtPenTheif:

The_root_of_all_evil:

BallPtPenTheif:

Booze Zombie:
What evolutionary purpose do you think aging serves?

i don't believe that aging has anything to do with evolution.

I do. If we didn't age, we'd have run out of food a LONG time ago.

but that's like saying that bullets serve a purpose in evolution. our ability to not age as fast and to buy more time to reproduce is a purpose towards evolution, not aging itself.

aging is just a hazard that occurs to all living things. it's a byproduct of existence not a function of it.

Don't know if I agree. Without Aging there would be no need for Procreation and thus no way of improving the Species, so no Evolution. It's only the action of the Free Radicals damaging the body that force us to have a system for making new genetical strands.

And bullets serve a purpose in Evolution, give me a handful and get me close enough to the teeny-boppers. ;)

The_root_of_all_evil:

Don't know if I agree. Without Aging there would be no need for Procreation and thus no way of improving the Species, so no Evolution. It's only the action of the Free Radicals damaging the body that force us to have a system for making new genetical strands.

And bullets serve a purpose in Evolution, give me a handful and get me close enough to the teeny-boppers. ;)

"In biology, evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next."

again, i don't see how decomposing molecules or bullets are directly related to this. the body's potential adaptation against these things is evolution but these things serve no purpose within evolution.

BallPtPenTheif:

The_root_of_all_evil:

Don't know if I agree. Without Aging there would be no need for Procreation and thus no way of improving the Species, so no Evolution. It's only the action of the Free Radicals damaging the body that force us to have a system for making new genetical strands.

And bullets serve a purpose in Evolution, give me a handful and get me close enough to the teeny-boppers. ;)

"In biology, evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next."

again, i don't see how decomposing molecules or bullets are directly related to this. the body's potential adaptation against these things is evolution but these things serve no purpose within evolution.

Because without decomposing molecules, you'd have no need for inherited traits, as there couldn't be a system that allowed for never-ending growth. Entropy is as much a part of the system as Energy.

And bullets are just fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing

*whistles innocently*

That's the page that inspired my to start this thread. On a related note, doesn't that mean that someone who didn't age would actually be weaker for it?