Discussing Evolutionary Theories that Explain Aging

Well, the point is that everything's going to die anyway.There's a story about Henry Ford. It seems he told his employees to look through junkyards at junked Model Ts and report on why they were broken. When they came back, he observed in their reports that there was one part that was never broken, no matter how beat-up the rest of the car was. So Ford went to his engineers and said: "You're using too much steel in that part, make it weaker."If you're going to die of starvation, disease, or being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger anyway, then there's no point in natural selection making you immune to aging, because a variation which would make you resistant to old age after you're dead has no selective advantage. And a variation which makes you more likely to die after you're dead is selectively neutral. And such a variation which also makes you fitter and healthier while you're alive would be favored by natural selection.

But it doesn't have to give an advantage to be permitted by the theory. It can be neutral, or it can be part of a trade-off in which it is not advantageous per se.

That doesn't mean that he has to be wrong about everything.

Well, I didn't talk about dying of old age, I talked about deterioration of fitness. My point is that if this will only happen after a member of your species will (in the evolutionary environment, in the natural course of things) have died anyway, then the mutation causing this will at the very least be neutral.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.