Why do living beings die?

rhia

If cells can always reproduce and replace themselves then why do living beings die?

Mk

It has something to do with the DNA of some of the body's cell's mitochondria. Its like a copy machine running out of toner, the copies get worse and worse until they aren't even functional. I remember a study from Scientific American, in which biologists altered lab mice's mitochondrial DNA in such a way that they lived.

Like this one: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in619735.shtml

Janitor

I would love to see an answer to this question within the context of a creationist vs. evolutionist debate. The creationist could legitimately challenge his/her opponent to explain why--taking the our own species as the example--a human typically lives about three generations before dieing. We can reasonably expect to see our grandkids, but if we see our great-grandkids at all, we will probably miss out on their entire adult lives. Why shouldn't natural selection and the "selfish gene" have led to a typical human living ten generations, or 50 generations?

I have a bit of an idea as to an answer the evolutionist could give, but at least for the moment I will not present it, so as not to bias any answers others may care to give.

aychamo

I think there is a very simple answer to that. Nothing would be selecting for or against the person living to whatever age, because they have already reproduced. Once a person has had their kids, it doesn't matter if they live another day or a thousand more years.

Noticibly F.A.T

So, aychamo, are you saying that essentially, the meaning of life is to reproduce?????

Jikx

If you mean "meaning" to mean "reason". The reason for life is reproduction.

And about the mitochondria - I know you inherit them mostly from your mother, so they are "old" already. How does that work in regard to aging?

And a personal opinion about aging - we age, we reproduce, because an undying individuals (on a cellular level) would have no capacity for variation and be vunerable to changes in the environment. So basically we age because living forever would mean our deaths ::confusing::

Mazuz

Evolution cares about the survival of our genes, not necessarily the individual. An individual that could go on reproducing for ever would be an advantage however. Perhaps its a situation similar to this.. We can build very reliable cars that will go hundreds of thousands of miles without a breakdown. But these cars will not perform as well as top of the line sports cars that need constant maintenance and have a high rate of break down. Evolution is a delicate balance involving genes and the environment and there are millions of reasons for the paths our genes have taken that we can't even venture a guess to with our current knowledge, this in no way is a challenge to the theory.

Perhaps we depend on some of the same mechanisms that cause aging but for other beneficial reasons that are actually key to our survival and success.

Or perhaps evolution has taken off from a design that is inherently flawed and simply hasn't been able to overcome the problem of aging yet or maybe ever.

selfAdjoint

Death and sex are two definite evolutionary strategies to speed up evolution, perhaps to keep up with the speed of virus evolution. They go back to the dawn of the metazoan lifeforms a billion years ago. Sex mixes and matches genes into new combinations. And death gets old combinations off the stage to allow the new ones to flourish.

aychamo

Yes. Getting more copies of your genes into the next generation.

Phobos

Although there is the grandparent hypothesis (or whatever it's called) in that in regards to our societal behavior, it is advantageous to have elders help their owns kids raise the next generation (ensuring the survival of their genes).

Why not keep going for more generations? Good question. But there is probably a point of diminishing return. Kids share 1/2 your genes, grandkids share 1/4, great grandkids share 1/8, etc. Eventually, the genetic similarity of your descendents to you is not that much different than the rest of the population. Balance that with the cost of upkeeping your body that long.

Also, although many cells can regenerate, there is still an accumulation of damage over an organism's lifetime (genetic, physical) which makes it harder to upkeep over time.

Also check out telomeres.
http://www.infoaging.org/b-tel-home.html

Phobos

Of course, a good question to what aychamo and I just said would be "why can't humans remain fertile their entire lives and therefore there would be a selection process favoring longer/eternal life?" I'll have to get back to that question (I recall Dawkins addressing that one) but perhaps it relates to the cost-benefit of self-maintenance vs. reproduction.

marcus

I agree with selfAdjoint.

I think it is in the genes interest for you and me to die after a certain amount of flopping around attempting to reproduce.

that way the genes get to try how it is in some new combinations

they are not only absolutely selfish, they are inveterate gamblers and always impatient to clear the board so they can try the next throw.

watch out for those suckers, they invented death and put the aging clock in you. You have an evolved program to selfdestruct. (our) death is just a way they figured out to give them more chances to recombine. It is no skin off their backs, they like death just fine.

marcus

Does anybody know when it was that Evolution invented death?
Some species had to accidentally acquire an internal natural death clock and then that species would have experienced an evolutionary advantage over species that hadnt learned the trick of dying

It would only be an advantage if the species had already invented sex.
or some other method of scrambling..
So when did sexual reproduction evolve? Anybody have a guess?

selfAdjoint

Finite life span is characteristic of all metazoans (multicelled organisms) except sponges, which diverged early from the main line of the metazoans. According to this theory single celled eucaryotes, metazoan ancestors, may have acquired cell-death (apoptosis) from an apoptopic protozoa in the pre-cambrian. That would be well over a billion years ago.

Janitor

My own idea is that there are some catastrophes that can overwhelm and kill any individual of a species so easily that evolution just never had the chance or reason to select for genes that would endow an individual with ultra-long life genes. I will give a simple model to show what I am thinking:

A caveman in any given year had these chances of dieing from means other than wearing out due to old age:

Roof of cave collapses: 3%
Sabre-tooth tiger attacks: 2%
Virulent micro-organism runs amock in bloodstream: 1%
Member of the cave tribe on other side of river crushes skull with club: 1%
==========================================================
Sum = 7% chance/year of being killed from one of the above environmental hazards.

Therefore the chance that any individual will live to age 50 is (1-.07)^50, which is so close to zero that the sort of genes that would theoretically allow an individual caveperson to maintain good body and brain function to such an age don't have any reason to establish a foothold in the cavepeople's gene pool.

I will go out on a limb and predict that, given how humans have in the last few thousand years eliminated environmental hazards such sabre-tooth tigers, there in fact is enough advantage to genes endowing a long life and long fertility that in 50,000 years our descendants (even if we don't tamper with ourselves through genetic engineering during all that time--not likely to be the case though!) will typically live substantially longer than three generations, and menopause in women will not occur in most cases until some age substantially older than 40-something.

Chronos

The Hayflick limit is an appealing explanation
http://www.infoaging.org/feat4.html

Phobos

I checked his book (Selfish Gene)...Yep, his argument/speculation was that with older age, women become less efficient at bearing healthy children, so statistically, it eventually becomes more effective for gene survival to care for grandchildren than to risk another birth of your own. So, in that sense, menopause would be an adaptation to promote that behavior. Men do not go through menopause perhaps because their fertility does not decrease that much with age and they invest less (physically) in bearing children than women do.