# why do we age and die?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-age-and-die/322426>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 19, 2005, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-age-and-die/322426 "2005-09-19T21:20:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\
**Post date:** [September 21, 2005, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-age-and-die/322426/21 "2005-09-21T01:01:55Z")

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> [@Blake](#):
>
> Wouldn’t we in fact die within minutes? Mitochondria need rapid gas exchange to function normally and the nucleus is pretty well isolated from those gases.

I didn’t suggest moving the mitochondria to the nucleus, just the DNA that the mitochondria have with them. Now maybe this won’t work, but it’s worth a shot if someone could figure out how to do it.

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**Author:** ![ambushed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@ambushed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ambushed)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2005, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-age-and-die/322426/22 "2005-09-26T06:45:06Z")

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> [@Rashak Mani](#):
>
> Imagine having a 250 year old american… someone who still boasts about killing Limeys in the Independence War. He still thinks flintlocks and oil lamps are great… blacks should be slaves… and a miriad of other stuff. If we were immortal we probably would have died out as a species. Constant “renovation” means new ideas and technology gets to be tried out. New generations have to seek new areas to live off or new stuff to make a living from.

Your notion that people cannot adapt to new ideas is without merit. I hope you were joking.

Postmodernists and other anti-scientific thinkers have long proposed the idea that radically new scientific ideas are rejected by the current generation of scientists and are only adapted by the new generation. That is total bullshit, as actual case histories demonstrate.

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**Author:** ![ambushed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@ambushed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ambushed)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2005, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-age-and-die/322426/23 "2005-09-26T06:48:46Z")

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> [@Blake](#):
>
> The problem with this is twofold.
> 
> The first is, as others have pointed out, that evolution doesn’t have such goals. It operates on the level of the good of the individual today, it can never operate on the good of the population tomorrow as you suggest it does…

What are you saying, that evolution does not operate on populations?

From: [Evolution, Population Genetics, and Genomics](http://www.bio.indiana.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/Lynch.html)

> [@](#):
>
> Evolution is a population-level process, and the underlying philosophy of our research is that “nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of population genetics.”

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