gmaster

It would simply take too many genetic changes in a too short period of time to change the aging rate to compensate for such a sudden change in the environment. Remember, genetic adaptation can take years, decades, or even centuries (think lactose intolerance which happens to be 1 gene).

The quantity of a particular species in an ecosystem has an equilibrium point. The optimal amount of a particular species is a number. If there's no death, this number will be pushed out of equilibrium, and the given species isn't dedicating its niche in the ecosystem to the most superior 'version' of itself, therefore not investing the niche resources in the best bet of progressing the species.

This is more than speculation, how is this not beneficial?

Just like organisms evolve things such as vision, frontal lobes, etc, we have evolved aging because it ultimately positively impacts the survival of species. This makes it an evolved feature, wouldn't you say?

Death and aging is a feature of evolution. These features evolved to further enable evolution and allow it to iterate more quickly. Species that iterated more quickly, and therefore evolved more quickly were more successful. Features that are deliberately evolved exist within many different genes as a mechanism to protect the feature, this is why dropout works so well on neural networks.