[easong]

It's disappointing that this article doesn't address the various animals with a degree of biological immortality (eg jellyfish, lobsters). I'm not convinced that the laws of thermodynamics make (human-scale) aging inevitable and insurmountable if there are several unrelated critters who have managed it.

More likely is that immortal monkeys don't make evolutionary sense given the energy requirements.

[msegal]

Another article in the same Nautilus chapter addresses some of the variety of aging styles in other plants and animals (and concludes that aging is not in fact inevitable): http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/why-aging-isnt-inevitable

[reasonattlm]

Lobsters are probably on the way out of the possibly immortal and into the negligibly senescent category. They were only in the former category because there was no way to measure the age of an arbitrary sample of lobsters retrieved from the wild. Researchers did find a way to measure lobster age reliably a few years back, so data will emerge on their life spans over the next few decades. It isn't a well populated or well funded area of study, so results tend to lag.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/12/tree-rings-lobsters