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February 9, 2009
Health
Why do we get old?

By Josh Mitteldorf (about the author)

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Why do we get old?

     In the context of evolution, natural selection is supposed to be optimizing fitness.  Getting old and dying seems to be the opposite of fitness.  Why has natural selection caused (or permitted) living things to deteriorate with age, and to die?

Oxygen is quite corrosive, and eventually it poisons the body's chemistry.
Their cells accumulate mutations as they divide over and over.
Nat selection has programmed them to die, to allow for turnover in the population.
NS has taken control of the death rate, to prevent population overshoot.
NS doesn’t care about old animals, because animals in nature don’t last that long.
Some genes rev the body up for short-term fitness, but have bad results in the long run.

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Josh Mitteldorf, a senior editor at OpEdNews, was educated to be an astrophysicist, and has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an (more...)
 

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