Literally planned obsolescence. Now I know how my smart phone feels.

Time for a class action against God. He's got the money. Every rich guy keeps comparing how much money they have to him.

I feel like its the opposite approach. It's a true MVP, and the current iteration of the product is viable with only the current approaches against obsolescence. There really is a lot of stuff there that repairs us and tries to keep us alive, they just have some flaws that are being randomly worked out.

Repairability Score: 8/10

Interesting. So by that line of thought, aging would be an evolved trait giving certain species an evolutionary advantage over others without aging.

This is, to a degree, what happens. However, a species that ages has an advantage in that new individuals, with perhaps better characteristics in the face of new circumstances, have access to more resources.

I do wonder whether there is a point where the lost experience of other individuals weighs heavier than physically better adapted individuals. In a way, culture serves as a way to preserve information that would be lost by aging.

> new individuals, with perhaps better characteristics in the face of new circumstances, have access to more resources.

Another way to interpret this would be “increased diversity.” Which is a selection advantage in an environment that experiences change. While organisms don’t have “clocks” they do have different rates of aging, implying a biological control. And species that live longer tend to hold on to longer genomes. This tends to mean that short lived species hold diversity in their population while Long lived species hold diversity in every genome. Both operate as fitness advantages, and seem to imply that aging is a biological quality.

So that would be like killing a program and respawning a new process instead for some benefit like reclaiming memory or speed (like I do with browser tabs).

I know evolution doesn't work that way, but definitely sounds like an interesting thought.

  > So that would be like killing a program and respawning a new process instead for some
  > benefit like reclaiming memory or speed ...
  >
  > I know evolution doesn't work that way, 

Sure its better now but that's how the early versions of Evolution worked (sorry couldn't resist !).

For downvoters, I guess parent is making a reference to the Evolution mail/calendar client from Gnome. Which is (was ?) indeed a memory hog.

Looks like evolution has decided that death is the winning strategy for long-term survival.

All species that didn't die of old age (if there were any) have disappeared regardless.

I'm not sure what class of error this is, but it's a common reasoning mistake in discussions on evolution.

By your same logic, you could pick any species at all and call their traits "the winning strategy for long-term survival" as long as you live contemporaneously with them.

There are known species that don't seem to exhibit planned senescence--the naked mole rat is a commonly discussed example. Check the Wikipedia page for biological immortality[1] for more examples and info.

The article essentially claims that ageing is likely a result of interacting thermodynamic processes. If so, then without specific preventative measures, organisms will "age".

The discussion at this level is pretty hand-wavy. So without introducing more rigor, the best we can say is probably something like this: there hasn't been strong selective pressure in the past to develop anti-ageing strategies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

That's untrue, there are a number of biologically immortal creatures[0]. Most recently found being the naked mole rat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

Exactly. Some tortoises as well can live a few hundred years, as well as wales, urchins, sharks, quahog clams, and as someone else mentioned– jellyfish.

Though you won't see any of them developing rockets and space-stations. To what extent that is an evolutionary advantage on our part I'll leave to general consensus.

There is a genus of jellyfish that don't die of old age because they can revert to juvenile form after aging:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

Looks like evolution has decided that time traveling through your farts is a bad strategy for long term survival.

All species that used the Time Travel flatulence method have disappeared.

How do you really know this to be fact? Perhaps it is simply something our cellular machinery can't "solve" or "fix"...

Emphasis is not exactly "can't", rather it is "has not yet"...

Animals die for lots of reasons, e.g. famine, predation, disease, injury, fights for mates. I doubt aging is necessary to ensure death occurs.

"IMO, aging is just a way to ensure that dying occurs"

The research 100% disagrees with you.

Aging even occurs in computers: every computer will eventually get in an unexpected state that it cannot recover from. This could even be caused by a stray UV ray that flips a bit in an important memory sector.

Computers are not autonomous self repairing and duplicating systems with the goal of survival hardcoded.

But computers are also very simple and very regimented systems where everyone makes the assumption that their state will never accidentally change and yet they still age

This is wrong, but it's a very common misunderstanding of evolution. There is no imperative for evolution. There is no "evolution must happen, how can we make sure of it"? Selection happens at the gene level, not the species level.

I don't think you can classify all dyings into one category for the purposes of evolution dying due to making a mistake is useful so a new version is released afterwards but just dying for no cause or due to poor design is actually something evolution should want to prevent with more time to live you have an increases odds of producing as many offsprings as possible.

It’s not just the number of offsprings a single individual produces, rather all offspring defending from that individual that should matter. You can waste energy trying to change according to the environment and live long enough to produce more offsprings, or you could use that energy to produce more slightly evolved offsprings Who in turn can produce more offsprings.

In that case you end up with population control problem.

Besides, if you look at all big society changes, you'll notice the old generation of people that lived before the change have a much harder time to accept / adapt to the new order while it's natural to the new generation.

> And dying is necessary for evolution

That's not true. An previous generation might actually be better suited to a particular environment than the current generation.

Sure, some previous generation specimens could be better survivors than their progeny - but for the most part, the cycle of the creation of many offspring with mutations and the dying off of the previous generations provides most of the evolutionary "force".

This force could come from environmentally caused deaths alone, though.

No, because characteristically, organisms dominate niches. Previous generation's ability to move out of the way prevents new generations from getting a chance to try out their new mutations.