I don’t think anything evolved to die. Dying is a prerequisite to evolution. If every individual were to survive, the gene pool would not converge towards more advantageous adaptations. The word “advantageous” means more apt to survive.
> Dying is a prerequisite to evolution. If every individual were to survive, the gene pool would not converge towards more advantageous adaptations.
This is kinda wrong. Reproduction is the perquisite for evolution. Evolution does not care much about your "survival" as a whole, especially after you reproduced. In "Survival of the fittest", you can better think of survival on the level of genes, not individuals, for the most part.
Aging doesn't seem to be inevitable: some animal species live for very long times even hundreds of years. And yet we have a predetermined lifespan far below that. Seems as though that's an purposeful systematic difference etween species that control how long each generation survive before death.
This might be more philosophical, but here’s how I think about. Would love to hear your take on it.
Before life, there was only death. At some point, something life-like sprung into existence, and soon died. And then it happened again. At some point it was able to reproduce, and then died.
Death is the default. It was always there. Some things managed to cheat it long enough to reproduce. Those things are alive.
This is why I don’t see that organisms evolved to die. The very first life-like things were dying, before they had the ability to reproduce.
Apoptosis happens at a cellular level and is controlled by higher systems such as cytokines. You haven't evolved to die, but your cells have evolved to die when instructed to.
