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Originally Posted by JimOfferman  We are in fact purposely programmed to die. There is very strong evidence that parts of our DNA control both aging and the "self termination" of the organism at old age. Strictly speaking, at the celular level, there is no reason why we should die - cells could just be renewed endlessly and flawlessly. |
Actually, we die because "Aging is a set of progressive changes in body composition, at the molecular and cellular level, which are side-effects of essential metabolic processes. Many of these changes are eventually bad for us -- they are an accumulation of damage, which becomes pathogenic above a certain threshold of abundance."
Look at our body as a complex machine, and throughout our lives, this machine slowly accumulates minor damages. After a certain time, those damages get too big and our body can't keep up anymore, and we die. But it wasn't programmed to happen, the point is that our body is just not perfect, it would need much more DNA complexity to be; therefore our mechanisms happen with minor errors that accumulate and eventually lead to our end.