[hackinthebochs]

True, you don't need extra information to prefer organisms that age out of reproductive fitness, but you might need extra information to ensure a timely death. It remains to be seen whether aging is just due to entropy or that regenerative processes are programmed to stop after a certain amount of time. Programmed death confers very specific fitness advantage to one's offspring as you're no longer competing with them for resources.

The sharing of genes within a population creates a nice analogy between the population and a single organism. Programmed death for members of an organism is a standard feature of evolution. It's not implausible that such a feature exists at the level of population as well.

[possibilistic]

This Wikipedia article has a review of several evolutionary aging theories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing

None of these has been proven or widely accepted, and the entire class of theories has many rebuttals. They are interesting to consider, though.