Title. Why do our bodies stop growing at one point and begin to decline in function? If the purpose of life is to live and reproduce, wouldn’t it make more sense to continually evolve and live forever? Also don’t our cells constantly regenerate? So if they do then why do they start to die out?
In: Biology
The “purpose” of life isn’t a goal exactly, it’s just what happens. If you get something that makes copies of itself, eventually there will be lots of copies of that thing. If all the copies die before they can make more copies, then there are no more copies of that thing.
Once you’ve made some copies of yourself, those copies can make the next round of copies, so you’re technically not needed for that anymore. Also, the fresher copies might be better at making more copies for a variety of reasons, so all you’re doing is taking up food that they could be using to make more copies. So from an evolutionary perspective, it doesn’t really matter if you die after a certain point.
For some things, the best strategy is to put everything you have into making a set of copies, even if it damages you in the process and reduces your chances of survival afterward. As long as there’s a copy running around somewhere, evolution mostly doesn’t care *which* copy it is.
Everything wears out eventually. It starts costing more and more resources to keep an old copy in the same condition as a new copy, if that’s even biologically possible. So nature doesn’t bother with that. It just keeps making the copies that are good at making more copies.
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