Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam988  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. |
I do look at our bodies as complex machines (see my first post in this topic). And I believe that our bodies know perfectly well how to repair themselves. With the exception of brain cells and a few others, all cells in your body are continually being replaced by newer cells, to ensure the survival of the organism as a whole. As the body ages, the rate of renewal slows and that (amongst other things, such as random mutations) ultimately causes the minor damage you mention and the eventual death of the individual. How fast or slow cells are renewed is controlled, at least in part, by our DNA - just as the growth in your youth was tightly controlled by DNA. The process of aging has thus effectively been "programmed" into us all.
As far as I know, some of the more serious research being done on prolonged lifespans is focussed on identifying and switching off the "aging genes" in our DNA. In theory at least, it ought to be possible to instruct the body to never age (= slow the rate of cell renewal) and thus live forever...
...or at least until you get hit by a truck, or some other unfortunate mishap.
Jim.