[pu_pe]

You are assigning intentionality to these mechanisms, but as the other commenter pointed out a much simpler way to view it is that death and senescence are just side effects, not actual mechanisms with evolutionary purposes. Organisms get born and need to reproduce, that's the mandate. There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die, so obviously DNA does not have organismal death programmed in, it has cell death which is necessary for organisms to live long enough to reproduce. Many of the things that are optimal for you to reproduce might not be optimal for you to survive a thousand years, and what happens to organisms outside their reproductive cycle is pretty much irrelevant to natural selection.

[jayGlow]

an organisms behavior outside of reproduction certainly can have an impact on natural selection. the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce by your logic their behavior shouldn't have any impact on natural selection. if a non-reproducing members behavior impacts those who can reproduce it will have an impact on natural selection.

[pu_pe]

I never said an organisms behavior outside of reproduction does not have an impact on natural selection.

[spwa4]

> There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die, so obviously DNA does not have organismal death programmed in ...

Of course there is. Without death, no natural selection. First, obviously, it gives precedence to children, who by definition are more evolved than parents. Now of course, you could say that accidental death is sufficient. But is it? Good question.

In practice there also appears to be evolutionary pressure for death to exist. There are very large, very old organisms alive on earth. Organisms old enough to have been alive when Jesus was born, when the Pyramids were built, organisms old enough to have "met" Neanderthals. Aside from a few individuals they were outcompeted in their native habitats.

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

They don't reproduce very much at all, and they're not very resilient as a species. The theory is that the parent organism occupies the entire habitat, and so reproduction fails. Then, at some point something happens to the organism as a whole and the entire species dies.

So, yes there appears to be evolutionary pressure to die. Ironically, the vast majority of large organisms that die of aging live longer than immortal organisms.

[anonymars]

> There is no evolutionary pressure for you to die

> what happens to organisms outside their reproductive cycle is pretty much irrelevant to natural selection

Certainly seems plausible for that to create evolutionary pressure: why have organisms still consuming resources if they're no longer contributing to reproduction / natural selection?