Aging And Evolution, Why Do We Grow Old?

It's been said that whoever said being old was a golden age, sure must have had a lousy youth. It seems unfair to have pain and woe where no matter how good we are or how hard we try, we grow old. As the song by Kenny Chesney says, "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to go now". They've found structures of our genes they say are a sort of natural timing fuse of the body, telomeres. As you get older, the telomeres always are reduced and the length of the telomeres is always proportional to the age we are in our life. They've also found an enzyme named telomerase that goes on the ends of the telomeres and telomerase actually stops the fuse from burning so some or many think telomerase may be a real elixir of life life and life, 1537, 1839, 1901, and 1977 was a real good month! Another causeology of aging is about the possibility of life as a sort of demolition derby like with a royal washing machine they wash ye old Isuzus with.. My stepfather says as he's gotten older he goes to the doctor and jogs, eats righter, etc because like an older vintage Jeep or Izuzu, due to wear, you have to spend more time on maintenance for the same payoff. It seems possible that if the process of growing wise is about wear and tear due to friction which is a natural result of what's called entropy or disorder, we could just replace all the worn out doors, wheels, fenders of a car as they wear out, just as we sometimes replace a spleen or knee, the idea is that if we could just learn the skill of replacement well enough, we could live forever. (Entropy in physics is about the reason of why the future is not the same as the past, since heat flows from hot to cold, the randomness of a foam of particles in the future is not the same as the more ordered energy of the present or past, this is why a weather report farther in the future is less predictable 8 days ahead more than say, 3 because the randomness is more and more with times ahead. Entropy is what causes aging of all mass and energy around us.)


I've wondered why we age, and now that I'm wiser, established, and rich, well who knows, why not! Consider the cells of your body, new cells are constantly being created and old cells are dying. If the old cells weren't dying with the new cells being added on we would become giant and overweight. To prevent this while hoping to stay the same age by the same method on the other hand if no more new cells were added, this would be a problem too, because all life is in motion and needs change, energy is in change, certainly all life is seen to be in motion. Without the overall change of cells dying and others constantly being created, an important source of life itself would be reduced. A church like the Methodists favors the change of preachers in years to another pastor, cleaning house. Because life is change, it's cleansing to eat more types of chow than just cheeze, exercise too is cleansing because it's more in motion. So it would seem the body needs cells to die a small death to avoid the larger death of the whole person if they were either too large to walk or function or if they were the same size and unchanging with no old or new cells (a.k.a. death). We have to be some size based on the balance of two opposites, what would make us large and what would make us small. There's just so much hemoglobin they can squeeze out of a GE light! The body is like a miniature ecosystem, it too is based on a balance of many types of opposites. If your heart has problems, you kidneys must work harder, for any flexor there is always an extensor (this is why in cardio boosts they say to flex to the left as you flex to the right, and so on). And the ecosystem is like your body, and this would be the cause of aging. It's not about just the tendency to go from simple to more random and just wear out the welcome of the fender shop because in life you go from poorer health at more risk when an infant to a maximum power at about 18 and with me then the aging began. If life never got old with the same birth rate life would take up more of the resources and room, but the resources are finite, there's nowhere all the life could live in a finite world. This is why I think aging is not like an illness that can just be cured. To prevent the worse catostrophe of no room to move, or no change with neither cells being born or dying, just as the old cells of your body make way for the new, evolution would have many ways to stop the worse catastrophe with the smaller catastrophe of aging and dying of individual cells or other life forms. Life would be a sort of war for peace where individual soldiers or cells give their life so other might live. Since the larger problems of the lack of aging would be worse, evolution may have many complex strategies to prevent the lack of aging beyond when we're a teen. Like cloning, it may seem to be a simple idea in outline, but because of the problems about room or change it may not be nearly as simple as just a roof or wheel transplant of a Geo or Chevy. What about telomeres, you may say? Here they find that the enzyme that stops the telomeres actually causes cancer in a large number of trials with cells given telemerase in the lab. Individuals with cancer don't grow large in size because the randomness the cells have is enough to be fatal without all the cells in the body multiplying. If they all were malignant without the individual with cancer dying, that person would be large in size. It seems that cell death and even dying is one important mechanism of evolution that saves us and the world from worse harm, if there was a better way with billions of years evolution would have found it. Aha you may say, the wheel, or civilization weren't in evolution and we achieved both. These are much easier to achieve than finding infinite recources or more room where there was no more, actually it's something not even civilization may achieve. Living is space stations is not viable, one explosion will set us back 25 years. It's estimated the cost of living in space stations to be one million per person.

Evolution would consider aging (beyond a certain time of life) to be worse than obesity because obesity has the use of the survival advantage in evolution of the store of energy. This is why it's easier for us to win weight than lose it, presumably while living evolution is seen to abound in health, like forest fires that whiff so good because we evolved with them, we might need a good store because there may have been food shortages once in a while. More about LIFE AS EVOLUTION. Thus while there may be many complex ways evolution may use to cause aging and resist no change or too much change in general, the large size of obesity may be better than trying to live forever because it had considerable survival value, obesity is just the increase of some cells of worth not all the cells like in cancer.

It seems no doubt that heaven exists as the retention by civilization of all the advantages of the good people achieved while they were alive, Sir Issac lives on because we remember what he did and said. Before the invention of writing is prehistoric by definition because we have no way of knowing what the prehistoric persons did while they were alive, it's not that they didn't live, just that there was no record of their deeds. Einstein influences us so he lives on when we read about him it changes our brain in a definite physical way because in brain research all change in thought is found to have a closely linked physical change in our physiology. When we think of others they are what we become, a sort of world wide web of thought, operating much like the web or civilization where most or all the advances are retained by most. Even if heaven exists by this motif, absolute life may not because of limited room and resources. Evolution seems to favor unselfishness as well as selfishness (after all carniverous life and sweet women were common in evolution) and giving up our physical life so others might live seems to be the most unselfish thing anyone could do, so yearning for a way to cure aging seems to be an easy way of life and not the way evolution would have it. As Shakespeare said, "There may be an afterlife whether we like it or not" so too we may have to be unselfish whether we like it or not. This also makes the idea of dying someday not so tough to live through for me not only because it makes life more precious by it's rareness but because it actually has a higher meaning of giving life to others, no doubt it's still wiser to make sure you're donation goes to the most good cause, in history many people have been decieved.


Darwin in Origin of The Species used the word "love" 87 times and "Survival of The Fittest" just once. If so why have people believed that there was no harm in what they've caused to the whales, chipmunks, or moose? People have seemed to believe that the law of the jungle is all that matters about evolution, and this seems to be true in all the nations of the world for most of history, based on their treatment of evolution. The answer would be that while there are plants that don't eat animals (autotrophs, self energizing) and plant eating animals, there would be animals that would eat other animals. Both of these types of animals that got energy from other life (heterotrophs) essentially would find energy by stealing it from other life. Evolution wouldn't think it unusual to get energy from other life, when we go out to eat a burger, we all do (well not mom the chef.) There's a distinction between robbing the energy from other life in moderation (like bosses, a necessary evil) like evolution would have it, and the larger problem of how people have disavowed evolution with over hunting. Because the overpopulation hunting causes is a sort of event where no one dies, this has the problems of why evolution favors aging in a powerful way to cleanse and cause new life if the resources are finite. With more extreme carnivorous hunting, there may be so many people and no one dying, in a few decades with no room no one may be able to move, and because this is a sort of defiance of aging, evolution may make people ill by way of the overpopulation in complex ways. As I say on my site about overcrowding as it relates to evolution there is already increased Competition for reduced Resources, causing such stress it seems to be causing illness, in evolution this would be good just as when you start to get cancer if your bodies immune system cleanses out the bad cells, the illness would reduce the overpopulation down to more moderate levels, and over millions of years of evolution, this oscillation of the illness and size of population would make a definite boundary. Only by the artificial use of weapons has this boundary been overreached. It may seem like a feeling about the law of the jungle, and since people haven't realized about how evolution may resist it so strongly, it may seem that cautions like this about the evolution of aging may just be ignored. But we're not just any people, we're wise, and moderation about evolution is of worth to us. The Greeks believed mirth was stronger than beauty, and I think if it's our own payoff to reduce the overpopulation and over hunting, because the problems the lack of evolution are causing may be much worse than moderation we may achieve it. This is something all of us may learn, not just a feeling. If people realize what they're getting for what about this and enough people reduced the birth rate, our world would be stronger than it is now in 2097!
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