Why Aging Isn’t Inevitable

Why Aging Isn’t Inevitable

Josh Mitteldorf & Dorion Sagan

Life spans range from Methuselans great and small to genetic kamikazes that die of a spring afternoon. Submerged dragonflies live four months, adult mayflies half an hour. We live some 70-odd years; but the meristem of the ginkgo may be millions of years old. This range becomes all the more impressive when we realize that the genetic basis for aging is widely shared across different species, from yeast cells on up to whales. Somehow, the same genetic machinery, inherited from our common ancestors at the dawn of life on Earth, has been molded to generate life spans ranging from hours (yeast cells) to thousands of years (sequoia trees and quaking aspen).

And it is not only the length of life but the pattern of deterioration within that time that varies widely. Aging can occur at a steady pace through the course of an entire lifetime (most lizards and birds), or there can be no aging at all for decades at a time, followed by sudden death (cicadas and century plants).

Our own “inner assassin” works with stealth, like an evil empress gradually poisoning her husband; but other species have inner killers that do their deed far more quickly, and still others appear to have no genetic death programs at all. Such variety is a sure signal for a feature molded by active natural selection, not an immutable law of entropy.

Why Aging Isn’t Inevitable

Josh Mitteldorf & Dorion Sagan

I think it is. I would prefer to look at this from the standpoint of biological engineering. One way to look at living organisms is as exceedingly complex machine-like systems of subsystems. In all human experience, there are no engineering designs that don't have failure modes and degradation of performance and eventual machine failure due to an accumulation of failures of various subsystems or individual components. This is seemingly innate to the nature of physical machinery. There is no perfect design - being physical they eventually wear out, sooner or later, regardless of the sophistication of the design. The design inevitably contains many tradeoffs of performance in various areas versus the cost of these features. One cost is always the reliability and longevity of the system.

Any system will sooner or later experience an irreversible system failure due to an accumulation of inevitably occurring component failures. These individual failures happen simply because these are material parts that can't last forever - they are subject to wear and tear no matter how clever is the self-repair mechanism. No complex mechanism can be free of failure modes no matter how clever the design process was - there had to have been many tradeoffs of performance versus reliability.     

With humans, the aging process at least looks as if it is the result of a design that was optimized for supporting conscious sentient intelligence, where the many design tradeoffs tended to favor maximum intelligence for the maximum period of time before the eventual inevitable error accumulation catastrophe occurs. 

From a metaphysical/spiritual standpoint, the soul plan?

For other living organisms, other different plans.

I think it is. I would prefer to look at this from the standpoint of biological engineering. One way to look at living organisms is as exceedingly complex machine-like systems of subsystems. In all human experience, there are no engineering designs that don't have failure modes and degradation of performance and eventual machine failure due to an accumulation of failures of various subsystems or individual components. This is seemingly innate to the nature of physical machinery. There is no perfect design - being physical they eventually wear out, sooner or later, regardless of the sophistication of the design. The design inevitably contains many tradeoffs of performance in various areas versus the cost of these features. One cost is always the reliability and longevity of the system.

Any system will sooner or later experience an irreversible system failure due to an accumulation of inevitably occurring component failures. These individual failures happen simply because these are material parts that can't last forever - they are subject to wear and tear no matter how clever is the self-repair mechanism. No complex mechanism can be free of failure modes no matter how clever the design process was - there had to have been many tradeoffs of performance versus reliability.

I don't see it this way at all.

The failure you use as an analogy (machinery) is woefully unsophisticated compared to biological life in my view.  Living things that had design aspects of "irreversible system failure" had no chance of surviving via natural selection.  As the article discusses, the decay in living things seems to be a design feature and not a thing of inevitability.  Meaning the design feature of decay/death could seemingly be engineered out (or at least significantly extended).

Now, how consciousness/soul/etc relates to the physical bodies in this line of thinking is another matter.

From a metaphysical/spiritual standpoint, the soul plan?

For other living organisms, other different plans.

so other living organisms don't have their own souls?