Life is destructive. Our environment and our internal functions all wear and tear at our body over time. Evolutionarily speaking, natural selection rewards those who can survive such hardship. So why don’t we live forever – why age at all?
There have been numerous attempts to understand how and why we age – as recently as 1990, the biologist Zhores Medvedev tallied more than 300 possible hypotheses. But according to Steven Austad, a biogerontologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one explanation has risen to the top: “Reproduction is the name of the game. Basically, we age because it’s not in nature’s best interest to perfectly repair our bodies. The main thing is to keep us reproductive as long as possible, and then let our bodies deteriorate”. (1)
People anxious about why they die.
As if they know what death is.
People trying to understand what the best interest of nature is.
As if they know what life is.
Prejudice. Definitions. Assumptions. Fear.
Guiding our philosophy. For thousands of years now…