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Why We Fall Apart
DM_NeoFLeX writes "An article in the September 2004 IEEE spectrum raises some interesting ideas comparing aging in organic organisms to aging in Electronic/Electrical systems. From the article: "The [reliability theory] is so general it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms...In the ways that we age and die, we are not so different from the machines we build.""
Why we fall apart is simple.
Sex.
If we reproduced by mitosis, we'd be effectively immortal, even better, we'd get up to 2^n chances to survive in the nth generation of offspring.
Given our specific method of sexual reproduction, you have basically one life to live. Anything that breaks down, any bad mutations (cancer), and that's it. Plus, you have to die to make room for your offspring, which I guess happens with protists and such bacteria as reproduce mainly asexually, but the offspring who you are making room for are arguably you.
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The article brings up some interesting points, but it brushes with a much to large a brush. Forinstance, for many functions cells are supposed to die to get a working system, unlike where the article suggets these deaths are a symptom of preliminary failure. Which is thus not the case.
The interesting part is more how the failure rate can be predicted by a kind of standard failure rate curve, as well as noting that humans start off with flaws from the start. With large redundancy to catch errors.
However, this doesn't really help much for solving aging though I believe, while it's certaintly nice to show it all falls within a certain class of failures. It doesn't tell you how to reduce it, thus for people looking for longer lifespans, move to the places with the real action and engineering.
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