What is the evolutionary advantage of death?

Question

I know death and cancer doesn't hurt humans' reproductive success. It's not helping either.

Why do we die? Why dying humans (all of us) are common? What's the point of dying?

Answer 1

Death is not only for humans. All 'complicated enough' organisms die (with a notable exception of Hydra, tough you may argue when it comes to the complexity). It is is easier to create a new organism from scratch than to repair both internal factors (free radicals, metabolic by-products, ...) and external (physical damage, exposure to toxins, ...).

Underlying causes of death actually can be evolutionary beneficial. For example, telomere offers protection against cancer (on a cellular level) but also bounds lifespan.

So actually they may be evolutionary competition (within the same species) of young and old. Mutations helping young but harming older may be preferred to the opposite ones.

Answer 2

From a systemic point of view, if we wish to evolutionarily induce our descendants (descendants of the current human race on the whole) to live longer lives, we would need to pro-create later.

If the whole of human race enforced a statute that prohibits pro-creation before the age of 40, then two pronged dynamics would happen

• only adults fit enough to pro-create after 40 would produce off-springs.
• only off-springs born to parents older than 40 who are fit enough would survive.

Since, there is a high tendency of abnormality and low survival of off-springs born to parents of older ages, absence of resource contention and genetic dynamics would encourage the initial propagation of the rare few fit off-springs.

Hence, unnatural "natural selection" would encourage the propagation of humans of longer life-spans. Perhaps, a natural disaster or viral outbreak could discourage humans from pro-creating before age 40. Perhaps, high rates of abortion. So long as the human race does not die out due to such restrictions. Perhaps, to the satisfaction of conspiracy lovers, a secretive organisation carries out a plan every 100K years to raise the bar for child-bearing age.

Therefore, it might be less of a question of advantage and more of the effects of motivation. That current status where

• high motivation for humans to pro-create early in life.
• low motivation for humans to have more children as they wise-up by being tired of raising kids too early.

Therefore, since no such secret organisation exists, there is infinitesimally little motivation for the existence of a "super-virus" type of humans to exist.

There is no motivation for super-humans to exist, because the distribution of life-spans have crowded out the food and survival resources of any possible primeval super-human.

Answer 3

Who is to say that having living Humans isn't hurting our reproductive success? Older non-reproducing humans cost the human network valuable resources and take up a sizeable portion of our living niche. Metabolically unstreamlined aged organisms are certainly not the most efficient and could potentially get in the way of better suited young'uns.