Aging is one of the most enigmatic phenomena in nature. It is not a disease, but a natural process — the gradual accumulation of damage and other changes within the organism, diminishing its capacity to maintain its health, to repair itself, and to survive.
To put it simply, over time, it becomes harder for an organism to keep itself in good working order. Like a complex mechanism that at first runs almost flawlessly it gradually wears out and loses efficiency. Yet the pace of this process depends greatly on the conditions of life and on how carefully the organism is treated.
It is remarkable that aging is not the same for all living beings. Some organisms — hydras, planarians (essentially flatworms), and certain turtle species, for instance — exhibit extremely slow or negligible aging. This shows that aging is determined not only by the fundamental laws of physics, but also by the particular path along which a given organism evolved. Although the accumulation of damage is inevitable for any material system, the rate of that accumulation and the organism’s capacity to resist it were shaped in large measure over the course of evolution.
But how did it come about - it applies to all species so surely it is nothing to do with Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden!
The roots of aging lie in an evolutionary trade-off between the preservation of the organism and the continuation of the species. Life has always existed under conditions of limited resources — energy, time, and materials. It has, therefore, always had to distribute them between two tasks: maintaining the existing organism and producing offspring. To accomplish both fully and at once proved impossible. It is precisely this fundamental trade-off that became one of the principal causes of aging.
But if we search deeper still, the roots reach back to the very origin of life.
From a philosophical standpoint, the defining systemic property of the first living cell was self-preservation. Had the first protoorganism (predating any cell) been unable to maintain its own organisation against the destructive processes of the surrounding environment, life simply would not have arisen. Nor would we exist today to reflect upon its origin.
An interesting point is that this may well have happened multiple times and resulted in endless evolutionary dead ends, the brief flicker of life that gets extinguished almost as soon as it starts, because it cannot maintain itself, before life found its way!
It was from this fundamental property that the instinct of self-preservation later grew — life’s first will, the will not to disappear.
All the other properties of life serve that same end — the preservation of the organism’s existence. To live, an organism must continually maintain itself. To so so it repairs damage, renews its cells, preserves its inner equilibrium, and sustains its metabolism, but this ceaseless repair comes at a cost. IT demands enormous expenditures of energy and is never absolutely perfect.
At the same time, life must grow, adapt to new conditions, and produce offspring. All of this, too, requires energy and thus, from the very earliest stages of life’s existence, a fundamental trade-off arose between preserving the existing organism and creating a new one. It can be said that evolution began when the first self-replicating cell appeared, and furthermore natural selection then favoured organisms that were better at surviving and more successful at reproducing. However natural selection, which to many replaced God, was limited in how much it could achieve.
The fact is that no organism can unlimitedly invest its resources in both the perfect maintenance of its own body and the creation of offspring. Then tension and drain would be too much for the organism to bear. Therefore it follows that the more successful strategy has to be to generally balance both requirements, but more in favour of the continuation of the species rather than toward the indefinite maintenance of the organism.
A medically trained member of my family pointed out to me, during the pandemic, that the Covid 19 virus had to become less virulent (potent) because for it not to do so would mean for it to kill all of its hosts which would result in it making itself extinct. Omicron-which emerged in South Africa if I remember correctly-was the biggest game changer when it came to Covid, and not any human intervention - not that I am dismissing human endeavour, treatments or vaccines. I can remember being personally delighted when Omicron became the dominant - and less lethal - strain of the virus.
Anyway as Older_Rah would say, back to the story. The bottom line is that mortality of individual organisms-given a limited lifespan sufficient for growth and reproduction became an essential element of the preservation of life itself. The trade off was simply a cost in the present to secure a more certain future. This does create a bit of a paradox in that continuity can only come about as a result of the mortality of a species.
Aging arose not because nature is “cruel,” and not because some special programme of death exists, but through the processes I have already touched on it is an intrinsically connected by-product of natural selection. Once an organism has already produced offspring, its subsequent fate has far less influence on the transmission of genes to succeeding generations. Natural selection therefore becomes progressively less effective at eliminating damage that manifests only in old age, allowing such damage to accumulate.
Moreover, many biological mechanisms help an organism grow faster and reproduce more successfully in youth, while at the same time accelerating its deterioration later in life. For evolution, early and successful reproduction usually matters more than a very long life for the individual. Such trade-offs therefore gradually became established over the course of evolution.
External mortality plays an additional role. If an organism is highly likely to die young — from predators, hunger, or disease — natural selection is less likely to favour excessively costly mechanisms for the organism’s long-term maintenance and repair. Well-protected species therefore tend to age more slowly and live considerably longer - elephants immediately jump to mind, as do Galapagos tortoises because, aside from the very young, the former are simply too big to be considered as prey (while there have been very few cases of a pride of lions taking a mature adult) and for the latter there are no natural predators in their environment.
Aging, then, is not the aim of evolution, but the natural consequence of limited resources, accumulated damage, and the way natural selection operates. We must also remember that evolution is not a perfected computer program that runs flawlessly, rather it is a process that operates through constant trial and error, drawing only on solutions that already exist. What natural selection does is increases the phenotype presence (the presented and therefore dominant characteristic as defined genetically) of these beneficial solutions in the population. Random mutations, historical constraints, and the gradual accumulation of damage therefore inevitably accompanied the development of life.
For billions of years, death was the principal mechanism for the renewal of life. It made room for new generations and new biological solutions, but today, for the first time, a form of intelligence has emerged that is capable of understanding this mechanism and of attempting to change it. Natural selection has never sought to make the individual organism immortal. It was enough that the organism should successfully pass its genes to the next generation. Humanity, however, can for the first time set before itself a different goal — to preserve not only life as a continuous process, but also its very bearer.
I once came across the statement that humanity is the end of evolution and natural selection because rather than adapting to a changing environment humans adapt environments to suit us so therefore there is no impetous or biological drive for us to continue to develop as a species. Of course the advent of AI might just throw a spanner in the works as we now have a challenger - a God of our own making!
To begin with life sought self-preservation as an instinct, but that has now been replaced with knowledge, through science, and conscious will. Perhaps one day humanity will learn to radically slow aging, or even be able to overcome it. This would not be a denial of evolution, but a new stage in it — the moment when life, for the first time, becomes capable of consciously altering its own biological limitations. If the first living cell adopted self-preservation as its guiding principle, then the human being may become the first creature able to carry that principle consciously to its logical conclusion.
The end of death.
If death was the principal instrument of evolution in the past, then knowledge may become the principal instrument of evolution in the future. Then the greatest achievement of reason will be not a victory over nature, but the continuation of nature’s own path — the preservation, development, and elevation of life through science, technology, and reason.
Of course this will be limited to the "haves" who have the resources to access such technologies and advancements for their benefit while the rest of us get left behind. It is a theme I have picked up on before and the best exposition of this future can be found in the book "Homo Deux" by Yuval Noah Harari, which again I have discussed in previous posts .
As always stay safe and well my friends.
