Under the same argument made in the article, a room can never be tidied. It can only become messier and messier. And yet, somehow, my house is set right every o

Under the same argument made in the article, a room can never be tidied. It can only become messier and messier. And yet, somehow, my house is set right every other Friday after the cleaning people come through. To me, it seems obvious that the second law is at most a contributory factor. The real reason we age is that indefinite longevity is energy-intensive and not favorable for the propagation of the information patterns in our genes. Our genes have optimized for propagation, because information patterns that didn't have died out or been dominated. Anything else, including whether you live a day beyond the minimum required to help your children propagate their genes, is ancillary. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you created a niche where the minimum reproductive age were gradually raised by artificial means. I suspect that in such a niche, you'd begin to see adaptations that would lead to longer lifespans. If you ran the experiment long enough on a large enough population, I'd bet natural selection would figure out how to get the average lifespan well above its current level. We could try it on some small animals [ed: not bacteria, since they do not reproduce sexually and it would be infeasible] to figure out if this is true, but it's hard for me to imagine it isn't. (How much human suffering would be involved, and whether we'd even recognize the result of this process as human, is also beside the point!)