We have been 'programmed' to ... limit our own life, and it turns out to be a good thing.

Systematic biology theory researchers have published a study showing that long-standing assumptions about the relationship between death and natural selection so far are false. It turns out that organisms are 'programmed' to limit their life.

Since the late 19th century, evolutionary biologists have argued that natural selection is beneficial for individuals with long lifespans. The longer the species lives, the more time it takes to create an individual to maintain the race, the more opportunities there are to reproduce.

Scientists have almost come to the conclusion: the combination of external factors (such as being eaten, disease, or accident .) and internal factors (biological decay leading to death death) will determine human life expectancy.

Is there any connection between death and natural selection?

Lifespan is selected and programmed according to genes

However, according to a new study published earlier this year in PLOS One, the theory that natural selection is always trying to motivate organisms that maintain the longest lifespan is actually one. mistake. All of us, in essence, have been 'programmed' to destroy ourselves.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, the head of the research team, said: ' We think that life expectancy has been selected and programmed through genes' . At first, this idea seems contradictory. Traditional evolution theory is based on the 'selfish' model of living organisms, when life is always maximized. This theory suggests that a species will not survive long if there is a genetic gene that causes individuals of this species to die before the usual natural deadline. But a lot of the real evidence in nature proves the opposite.

For example, the octopus only lives until the birth and suddenly dies shortly after. According to natural selection theory, this gene will be eliminated because it is not beneficial for the species. Many theories have been proposed to explain this contradiction, but they still have no answers. This is clearly a sign of genetic programming, not of biological decay.

Octopus will continue to live if an endocrine gland is removed.

Bar-Yam and his colleagues are still arguing that natural selection really supports self-destruction and reproduction, not the maximum life time of individuals. In other words, organisms can have a longer lifespan than today, but natural selection has supported individuals who remove themselves earlier.

To this conclusion, Bar-Yam and his two colleagues at Harvard's Biological Research Institute began a fundamental question: Is there an environment in which genes will limit their lifespan? ?

The answer is not only 'yes', but it turns out that such an environment exists in reality.

Bar-Yam and colleagues applied a technique to study complex systems, called spatial models. They have shown that if, according to the conventional natural selection theory, species always follow the 'selfish' tendency to prolong their life as long as possible, this may have short-term benefits but be a long-term disadvantage.

According to the team, the long-term success of this self-limiting mechanism lies not only in optimizing the life of an individual. It also optimizes the life of a population optimally based on the specific environment in which it lives.

So how do evolutionary scientists link death with natural selection in the wrong way? Only August Weismann, who in 1882 argued that death was programmed, and when others considered the impact of natural selection, they all took the average life of living organisms. Different environments, instead of looking at each individual in a specific living environment. Because then they removed that individual from their particular location or location in a certain population, ie ignoring the complex relationship between their individual and environment, making the properties math is wrong.

Reducing lifespan helps to limit resource consumption and proliferation of species to suit their environment.

If we exhaust our resources, we will be in big trouble

Natural selection supports self-limiting life with some very deep meanings. First, it sheds light on the human problems we face when the global population is growing. Our economic system hardly operates under autonomy model - development capitalism entails selfish acts. Although this is beneficial for selfish individuals in a short time, it can become our danger in the long run.

What people impact on the environment will affect our own viability. We all know that, if we exhaust our resources, we will be in trouble.

But things are not completely deadlocked. Bar-Yam points out that if death is 'programmed' genetically, it could also be 'hacked'. People cannot be dependent on the environment, but millions of years ago our lives were established. We can adjust that mechanism and help humans live longer.