Comment by api
4 hours ago
There's a lot of indirect evidence for this from the fact that some naive attempts at stopping aging give you cancer, like turning telomerase on indiscriminately.
Almost everything in nature has multiple functions or causes, but one cause of aging is probably an evolutionary compromise between longevity and not getting cancer.
One option, I guess, would be turning the guard rails off and just getting incredibly good at treating cancer or inventing some extraneous cancer detection and killing mechanism.
It’s rarely such a simple tradeoff that only two things are being optimized. Modern humans live way longer than wolves for example despite being of similar body mass. However that’s fairly new in our evolutionary history as wild chimps for example cap our at ~63.
Cancer is extremely rare as a cause of death in wild animals. Again is more common but late enough that reproduction has produced multiple offspring.
Energy expenditure isn’t something we’re concerned with but drives a great deal of evolutionary optimization.
> one cause of aging is probably an evolutionary compromise between longevity and not getting cancer
Yes, and proteinopathies, and likely lots else besides. We probably don’t even understand the failure modes that aging protects against.