The maximum age hasn’t changed because its increase is irrelevant for the sake of trait propagation. In fact, fast breeding population with regular turnaround can deal with environmental fluctuations way better than a long living one.
There’s nothing inherent to multicellular biology that prevents immortality. Every problem preventing us from living longer and healthier has been solved by evolution somewhere else. Often in a way that’s insultingly similar to how our bodies already work. Hell, good chunk of solutions is present in our genome never to be expressed!
But then evolution is all about populations of borderline inadequate survivors. Turns out, being depressed, hurting, and cancerous in your fifties is just good enough.
Exactly. We’re programmed to die of old age, not because it’s impossible for things to be otherwise, but because it was so darn advantageous. It speeds up iteration, allowing the genes to evolve at a faster rate. Evolving immortally would be an expense without much benefit, so it generally wouldn’t happen naturally.
Yes we could evolve to live longer, but as you point out we are not, and science is no where near rewriting the code to fix that in designer babies let alone already old rich pricks.
Naturally it would take a long time and it is hard to see how we would evolve there, but parrots, some turtles, tortoises, sharks, sturgeon, and idk what else have done it.
Greenland sharks live over 500 years I think I saw on a post on the big site.
The maximum age hasn’t changed because its increase is irrelevant for the sake of trait propagation. In fact, fast breeding population with regular turnaround can deal with environmental fluctuations way better than a long living one.
There’s nothing inherent to multicellular biology that prevents immortality. Every problem preventing us from living longer and healthier has been solved by evolution somewhere else. Often in a way that’s insultingly similar to how our bodies already work. Hell, good chunk of solutions is present in our genome never to be expressed!
But then evolution is all about populations of borderline inadequate survivors. Turns out, being depressed, hurting, and cancerous in your fifties is just good enough.
Exactly. We’re programmed to die of old age, not because it’s impossible for things to be otherwise, but because it was so darn advantageous. It speeds up iteration, allowing the genes to evolve at a faster rate. Evolving immortally would be an expense without much benefit, so it generally wouldn’t happen naturally.
Yes we could evolve to live longer, but as you point out we are not, and science is no where near rewriting the code to fix that in designer babies let alone already old rich pricks.
Naturally it would take a long time and it is hard to see how we would evolve there, but parrots, some turtles, tortoises, sharks, sturgeon, and idk what else have done it.
Greenland sharks live over 500 years I think I saw on a post on the big site.