Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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| Quote (Daniel Smith @ Oct. 03 2007,03:06) | If an organism gets a mutation that somehow disables the aging process and keeps these processes working - thereby increasing it's progeny considerably - natural selection will look ahead, decide that one species living too long is not good for the planet, and then cause that organism to die early anyway?
You're going to have to explain to me how this unthinking, uncaring, unintelligent force can suddenly show this kind of forethought! |
This is a valid objection, and I think Albatrossity could better state his point. Natural selection does not select for the good of the planet, or the future. It operates locally in the present and quite blindly with respect to future consequences.
Generally speaking, long life and certainly immortality are not selected for because opposing the 2nd law is never a passive process; it demands resources devoted to error correction and repair, and those resources will only be present if selected for. But this is unlikely. Survival until an organism reaches a youthful reproductive run is difficult enough as it is (in most species the a majority of individuals don't survive to reproduce at all), and under those circumstances selective pressures inevitably optimize organisms to survive simply to attain a period of reproductive maturity. Resources diverted to opposing entropy and ensuring a long life beyond this point are increasingly likely to be squandered as time goes by, because death in the wild comes from all directions (accidents, disease, predation etc.), not just entropic breakdown. In such cases resources dedicated to longevity don't have the opportunity to contribute to the organism's reproductive success, and there is a point they become a bad bet and optimizing youthful reproductive success a better bet. This is especially true to the extent that maintaining them reduces the organism's short term reproductive fitness (because fitness resources are finite). As a result they tend to be selected against in most circumstances, and hence most species are stuck with senescence and death.
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