What is the evolutionary advantage of aging?>your body becomes weak>your mind becomes clouded>you can no longer hunt and have to be taken care of by the tribe>the tribe has to spend decades of resources to grow a replacement for you to do your jobSeems to me that a longer fit lifespan where you can work at maximum effort would be a pretty incredible competitive advantage leading to evolutionary selection but that doesn't seem to have been the case.Why is that?
>>16898335There's no evolutionary advantage or disadvantage, evolutionary pressure stops mattering when you become unable to breed
>>16898335It doesn't matter if it benefits you, so long as it benefits the chances of your genes getting passed on.
>>16898336Even if you cannot breed you can still help your offspring increasing their chances of successfully breeding.Besides that, what evolutionary benefit is there in becoming unable to breed?
>>16898340>Besides that, what evolutionary benefit is there in becoming unable to breed?Preventing overcrowding
>>16898339How does aging benefit the chances of your genes getting passed on?Seems to me it does the exact opposite as you become a drain on resources of the family and tribe instead of a contributing member as your body weakens and mind rots.
>>16898341Is that a real effect? It would seem that historically and in Africa the real limit on breeding seem to simply be the access to sufficient food instead of aging.
>>16898340>>16898341>>16898342>>16898344
>>16898335A big competitive advantage that you aren't considering is adaptability. Shorter lifespans mean faster evolution and genetic adaptation to changing environments>>16898341That makes sense
>>16898340>Besides that, what evolutionary benefit is there in becoming unable to breed?Planned obsolescence. Gotta clear out the old generations to keep the gene pool evolving.
>>16898364>>16898368That makes sense with, say, wolves where adulthood is achieved after only one year of resource usage for the individual. But for a human, the resource investment per individual is immense, a much longer lifespan would make more sense.
>>16898372>But for a human, the resource investment per individual is immense, a much longer lifespan would make more sense.Absolutely, that's why our lifespan is much longer than wolves
>>16898372You should realize, we're well beyond the limits of our physical bodies at this point.'Humanity' is really more about culture, knowledge and experience.That's why we create books so that those aspects of ourselves can be pseudo-immortal and spread to the rest of humanity in a way genetics fails to.
>>16898373Mature, healthy lifespan is, what, ~30 years (20yrs to 50yrs)?And it takes to grow an adult 15-20 years.For a wolf it takes 1 year to reach maturity and they live up to 10 years with good fitness.The return on investment seems much greater with wolves than men.
>>16898382Now certainly in the recent past, especially in the past two hundred years, a longer lifespan would offer an extreme competitive advantage but I'm mostly speaking of the longer span of human history, the past 100 000 years, where evolution would have had time to have effect.
>>16898335There is none - aging has nothing to do with evolution and everything to do with physical limitations on cellular replication processes.
>>16898340>attrition rateNature is a corner cutting innovator, does that explain it clearly enough? Optimized enough on a genepool level.
>>16898398Why keep aging entropic bodies around when they simply condense their experience into folktales and such?
>>16898335As I understand it Aging is not a breeding advantage or disadvantage but a result in the flaw of DNA synthesis: RNA primers.To synthesize DNA the polymerase that copies it cannot begin on a single strand of DNA. So the synthesis must be primed with a short extension of RNA. That RNA primer is not coded into DNA. It is removed and eventually the loose strand of DNA is also removed.Thus, every time DNA is replicated you lose some of it.Cells evolved telomeres which are lenghty sections of DNA at the tips of chromosomes that don't code for anything but serve as DNA that can be scrapped without losing the vital genetic code of the chromosomes. Eventually the telomeres are withered away and DNA synthesis starts eating away at the functional segments of the genetic material. Thus the cells lose their ability to function, many becoming cancerous in the process before the body ends up just not having the means to sustain itself and the organism dies.
>>16898409Because raising a new productive member of the tribe who has learned his trade takes +20 years.
>>16898335>What is the evolutionary advantage of aging?humans and other animals were never meant to live to old age. you were meant to have kids at the first opportunity, pass on your knowledge, live long enough to give them a reasonable start in the world, and then die from disease, starvation, injury/infection, or being eaten because you were too slow.any animal that lives too long dies from starvation, disease, or predation.
>>16898335>evolutionstopped reading there
>>16898478By means of natural selection. (And genetic drift)
>>16898335it's just a physical limit.also reproducing at a young age is important and if there comes a time when old men are fathering a large portion of children, the species will be permanently damagedsimilar to inbreeding
>>16898335Aging is basically a built-in time limit for you to get stuff done. Otherwise you'd just do nothing forever.
>>16898335Anon if you take care of yourself you can be pretty fit until like 75Really the real question is why don't men have an equivalence to menopause
>>16898335probably to avoid competition of an organism with its own offspring.there's probably some balance of lifespan where an organism lives long enough to reproduce while dying before it's continued existence is just competition for its offspring.
>>16898400>>16898478why are these the only two posts in the thread that realize the question is inherently retarded and based on a retard misunderstanding? actually, that's a stupid question too since I already know the answer. I'm on the internet, using 4chan, a website notoriously full of under educated, under served simple brained morons.for those of you who managed to obtain literacy some fucking how, here you go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10041/
>>16898785that paper seems to explain aging is strongly controlled by genetics which therefore means its affected by the processes of evolution.
>>16898335The evolutionary advantage of aging is that it removes you so that the people who came after you can take your place and flourish themselves. People don't change, and you can't change people, but what you can do is get new people. The human race does this by reproducing, and in order for new generations to have the jobs, lands and property, and status of previous generations, those previous generations have to get old and die. Simple as.Without aging we would stagnate under one group of people like we have over the last 75 years because people aren't dying fast enough.
>>16898791okay let me put it more plainly for you since you're clearly one of the retards:what do things do over time? changewhy? because physicsso maybe the question isn't "hurr durr why evolve aging?" and instead "gee isn't it cool the physical process of evolution landed biological organisms at such a neat solution for defeating the processes of change for so many years?"
>>16898335The modern human lifespan is not natural, our ancestors died at most around 50, they weren't alive for decades after becoming old
