Wednesday, December 12, 2012

If There was No Aging

If there was no aging, then how would the evolutionary selection process work? The fitness of an individual would still depend on the same factors, but there would be more non-reproductive age individuals within the population. These non-reproductive age people, would have some selectable advantage if they were older, but perhaps, that advantage would dwindle as their age continued to increase. So, the evolutionary pressure for those people to survive would become less as they past a certain age. Especially with humans, there are means by which important knowledge and skills are transferred from generation to generation through various forms of technology and the like (language, books, apprenticeship). Maybe if there was no technology, people would live longer.

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