Modulous writes:
Careful. If we don't get older until older - there wouldn't be more old people around.
I wasn't using the word "old" in the sense that they are useless 3 legged beings. I used it to describe any generation that precedes the current for lack of a better word.
There'd be less old people around because more youthful people would die through predation/accident/murder/suicide etc.
And I was using it in context of how animal species consume natural resources. Please don't simply dismiss the contexts involved.
It is tempting to think of things from a human perspective, but we are a rare exception as far as animals dying of old age goes...
Again, going by context at the time, I wasn't talking about the current human population. I used "mommy and daddy" as a humorous gesture to describe a hypothetical animal species.
Mostly everyone else gets selected out of the gene pool much earlier
Which was exactly my point... if you bothered to look at the overall context.
But an organism doesn't care about its species.
Who said anything about caring or not?
As long as it doesn't adopt a strategy that is directly harmful to its environment (such as killing off all mates), an organism that has a long life gene will live longer and will produce more children which can also live longer (even if - in the long term - that would be harmful to the species).
The hypothetical species I was referring to had (1) very long lifespan, (2) produces at relatively the same rate as the average mammal, and (3) consumes relatively just as much resources as the typical mammal. If you want, you can replace the word mammal with any other classification, doesn't matter. Combination of regular breeding and long lifespan with regular consumption of resources is in itself a negative trait that should be weeded out due to limited space and resources.
It would be advantageous for genes to create beings that lasted as long as is physically possible to spread as many copies of themselves as possible.
Perhaps, but many species approach this with producing fewer but healthier offsprings that have more chances of survival.
Living longer means your alleles increase in frequency and as such it should be something that gets positively selected for.
Nope, not if a generation lives long enough to compete with the younger generations for the limited resources that are around, assuming resources and spaces are limited. Many species have solved this problem by killing off a great number of parent individuals right after mating season.
The puzzle then, is why don't we see such creatures?
We don't see such creatures because we don't want mommy and daddy (context) to compete with little Dan and Dan's little Robert.
Biology aside, even our economic system have clear examples of how the parent and grandparent generations make it hard for the younger generations to be successful. With recent economic downward sloping, many companies have stopped hiring newer, younger, fresh-out-of-college hot-shots. Why? People are living longer and healthier than previous generations due to better sanitations and medications. Because of it, the retirement age is now as high as ever before and there are talks of increasing the retirement age still. I know of computer science and programming majors that have had to resort to work as telemarketers while previous generation IT's sit comfortably in their secured jobs.
immortality = more young not more old!
I wasn't using the word "old" to mean useless three-legged humans. I used it to mean any generation individual that is older than the latest generation individual.
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The thread about this map can be found here.
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