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If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through. For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long e
by sothatsit 1y ago
If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through.
For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes.
Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.
- simianparrot 1y agoAnd evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge. I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.