| > 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. |