Comment by mullingitover
21 hours ago
It's a feature of every species that evolves. You can't evolve if you're striving to outcompete your offspring. You quickly game out that not having offspring is the winning chess move there. Now you're not having offspring, and thus you're not evolving. Then the environment changes and you, being unable to adapt in any way, go extinct.
Cheating senescence is kind of the ultimate adaptation. If we can crack this then I'd expect designing other artificial adaptations to be quite tractable in the future.