[duckduckcow]

There's a lot of evidence suggesting that it's a feature rather than a bug.

There's lots of bad things that happens as you get older and upregulation of inflammation plays an important part in that.

The thing is it's not random though. It happens in a synchronized fashion.

It does seem increasingly likely that our genetic code contains instructions to make us increasingly frail and sick as we get older,to slowly increase the probability of death.

We see this more clearly other places in nature. Closely related species that have ended up in different environments over time can have dramatically lifespans.

I have seen various hypotheses for this, including models that suggest that there's a tendency for older individuals to keep too much of the resources so that the younger generations won't have enough resources to grow and flourish.

[wrinkl3]

Or it could just be that there was never a lot of evolutionary pressure for the "stay fit while old" traits. Being healthy for long enough to reproduce and provide some care for your progeny was usually good enough from the evolutionary standpoint, so the frailty-at-old-age genes weren't actively selected against.

[duckduckcow]

It could be, though with a bit of Googling I found this blog post summarizing scientific studies that suggest otherwise.

https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2016/05/16/no-animal-...

[pawelmurias]

I find it super hard to believe that get older faster genes have a universal advantage that makes them widespread across a lot of species.