| > the genetic version of vendor lock-in All models are wrong but this one is mine, IANA biologist, yadda yadda. - there are only so many resources to sustain individuals - ergo there's a cap of the number of individuals - ergo some individuals will die, if not from age, from attrition - if age is not factored in, there are more old individuals, genetic competition between young individuals is reduced as they have to compete for resources with old individuals - ergo age which kills old individuals irrespective of available resources allows more young individuals to exist in such a pool - ergo ageing a) promotes competition between young individuals b) increases mixing of the gene pool - ergo it promotes quicker turnaround on mutations - ergo ageing is a significant asset in species adaptability to change IOW vendor lock-in sucks in face of changing conditions as one is suddenly stuck with a suboptimal solution and competitors have a harder time emerging to challenge the status quo. conversely the benefits of short term ageing are counterbalanced by social effects, where elders, even when not reproductive anymore but still otherwise in good health and thus autonomous as well as minimally consuming resources, are able to provide support for their chain of descendants, freeing energy for parents-to-be to reproduce, then parents to gather more resources that are then directed to support their younglings. The lack of reproductiveness of elders is advantageous to the species as it removes them from the direct gene mixing pool, instead promoting the younger ones. IOW for its individual lives to be longer, a species goes increasingly social, channeling more support and thus energy towards their younger members, but ageing is still key otherwise the species ability to face quick change (at evolutionary scales) is severely hampered. The deeper question for me is whether ageing is a specific primary process (a literal clock, which a technique such as the paper would attempt to skew backwards) that emerged from evolution or if it is a secondary effect from entropy corrupting other processes (e.g there's constant degradation + a ton of error correction but at some point degradation is too high and error correction cannot cope, triggering a catastrophic cascading effect leading to the sudden inability for an organism to sustain its own life, which the paper would delay by introducing younger cells, thus less errors, thus error correction can cope for longer) |