by thenewgreen

Death in that sense is a specific process called programmed cell death. It’s controlled by the genes, it costs energy, and it’s very deliberate. Cells that have become damaged kill themselves and remove themselves and are often replaced with pristine new cells from the stem-cell population. Sex is doing that at the level of individuals by recombining genes. What that’s doing, in terms of natural selection, is increasing the differences between individuals. It’s increasing the variability in the population, and that aids natural selection. And what natural selection is seeing as the differences between people is back to sex again. How many offspring are you leaving? For us, that particularly means men. Selection is very biased toward a relatively small proportion of men leaving far more children.

mk, b_b and ecib Nautil.us has chosen "aging" as their topic:

http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging

Perhaps worth checking out...