[themafia]

> Death is fundamentally a way to optimize reproduction

You could equally argue that it's a way to optimize lifetime energy efficiency.

> The cells humans are made of are immortal,

Yes but DNA transcription is not error free and most body parts do not grow back after being lost, most perniciously, our teeth. Elephants grow 6 sets of them, but due to their diet, they can end up fully losing all their teeth before they die.

> it's dying of what you might call 99.9% victories against disease

The planet we live on is warmed by the Sun. The Sun's energy can also destroy our cells. It's not just disease.

[shevy-java]

Quite true. Regrowing teeth should not be too hard though - after all the information for growing teeth already is in most humans. One just needs the correct transcriptional activations again. I am sure this will be solved eventually; as for how long that will take ... who knows.

[themafia]

The odd thing is in Humans is that if we loose our teeth the jawbone itself also starts to recede. Part of the process of installing an implant is doing either a matrix or a cadaver bone graft in order to overcome this.

We are, in some sense, meant to accept the loss of our teeth, likely because it impacts lifetime energy efficiency in some way that we're not correctly observing yet.

[otikik]

Perhaps the jawbone receding is just a way to make us less attractive, so we are less likely to procreate. Perhaps natural selection just wants us to die once we are out of teeth, and to remove our genes from the pool. It really doesn't care about individuals.

(I am aware that natural selection doesn't "want" or "care" about anything. It is just a convenient way to say it).