Speaking for the intuition of wear and tear, it does seem surprising to me that an “embedded repair system” has enough redundancy to not get worn down by the real world.
I think this is a priori reasonable, but we do have existence proofs of animals that don’t seem to age. Even if you think (say) naked mole rats are probably ageing a bit (just too slowly for us to detect on the timescales of our experiments) that doesn’t address why all other rodents don’t age at the same (very low) rate. I don’t think wear-and-tear will get you anywhere when trying to address divergence in lifespans between related species.
As for bones, there are vertebrates that can regenerate whole limbs, so it’s certainly doable.
I see my bones example didn’t really work. I wasn’t trying to claim that is in fact how bones work, but to point at a way an organic structure could be built that would make repairs hard.
For example, cut-and-cover is a great way to construct utility lines and metros, but you can’t really do it anymore once you have lots of underground structure in place
I think this is a priori reasonable, but we do have existence proofs of animals that don’t seem to age. Even if you think (say) naked mole rats are probably ageing a bit (just too slowly for us to detect on the timescales of our experiments) that doesn’t address why all other rodents don’t age at the same (very low) rate. I don’t think wear-and-tear will get you anywhere when trying to address divergence in lifespans between related species.
As for bones, there are vertebrates that can regenerate whole limbs, so it’s certainly doable.
Thanks, that argument makes sense.
I see my bones example didn’t really work. I wasn’t trying to claim that is in fact how bones work, but to point at a way an organic structure could be built that would make repairs hard.
For example, cut-and-cover is a great way to construct utility lines and metros, but you can’t really do it anymore once you have lots of underground structure in place