I agree with both replies, that if there are species, including mammals, which live very long, then the mechanisms responsible for killing us have not been here “since the first multicellular organisms have appeared”.
Was aging death reinvented independently by so many species, because statistically, at some moment most of them encountered a mutation that provided a Faustian deal of an advantage X, in return for death at age N (for various values of X and N)? And the few immortal ones are simply those who avoided this class of mutations (i.e. had the luck that any mutation causing death turned out to be a net disadvantage)?
Or are the mechanisms of aging death more general, and there are a few species which found out how to avoid them? In other words, are the immortal species descendants of mortal species? Is there a chance to find the answer in archaelogical record? (Whether the common ancestor of a mortal species and an immortal species was mortal or immortal itself.) I’d like to see the entire evolutionary tree, with colors, like these species are/were mortal, these were not.
Or are the mechanisms of aging death more general, and there are a few species which found out how to avoid them?
There’s a fun question. One of the main things which spurred the current wave of aging research was the discovery that certain interventions increase lifespan across a huge range of different species (e.g. calorie restricted diets). That strongly suggests conserved mechanisms, although it doesn’t rule out some species-specific mechanisms also operating in parallel.
I haven’t looked this up, but I’m fairly confident the negligibly-senescent species are descendents of species which age. Examples of negligibly-senescent species include someturtles, rougheye rockfish, and naked mole rats; I’m pretty sure the closest relatives of most of those species do age. Again, I don’t have numbers, but I have the general impression that negligible senescence is an unusual trait which occurs in a handful of isolated species scattered around the evolutionary tree.
I agree with both replies, that if there are species, including mammals, which live very long, then the mechanisms responsible for killing us have not been here “since the first multicellular organisms have appeared”.
Was aging death reinvented independently by so many species, because statistically, at some moment most of them encountered a mutation that provided a Faustian deal of an advantage X, in return for death at age N (for various values of X and N)? And the few immortal ones are simply those who avoided this class of mutations (i.e. had the luck that any mutation causing death turned out to be a net disadvantage)?
Or are the mechanisms of aging death more general, and there are a few species which found out how to avoid them? In other words, are the immortal species descendants of mortal species? Is there a chance to find the answer in archaelogical record? (Whether the common ancestor of a mortal species and an immortal species was mortal or immortal itself.) I’d like to see the entire evolutionary tree, with colors, like these species are/were mortal, these were not.
There’s a fun question. One of the main things which spurred the current wave of aging research was the discovery that certain interventions increase lifespan across a huge range of different species (e.g. calorie restricted diets). That strongly suggests conserved mechanisms, although it doesn’t rule out some species-specific mechanisms also operating in parallel.
I haven’t looked this up, but I’m fairly confident the negligibly-senescent species are descendents of species which age. Examples of negligibly-senescent species include some turtles, rougheye rockfish, and naked mole rats; I’m pretty sure the closest relatives of most of those species do age. Again, I don’t have numbers, but I have the general impression that negligible senescence is an unusual trait which occurs in a handful of isolated species scattered around the evolutionary tree.