Why do we die? – Oxygen Zone

Question: Why do we die?

Asked by hannahjanehunt to Matt, Hugh, Douglas, Antonia, Tom on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: General. This question was also asked by mattyfairhurst.
- Matthew Hurley answered on 13 Jun 2010:
  
  Do you mean ‘what makes us die?’, or ‘why do we die?’. This could be answered in many different ways depending on how you define ‘living’ or why you think we are living –
  
  In the medical sense we die because the oxygen and nutrients supply to our organs is not enough – our heart stops followed by our other organs, including our brain, and we cease to be. This can be for many reasons including disease, accidents, or aging.
  
  We age because the lengths of our chromosomes get shorter over time (the bit called telomeres), our bodies are less able to repair themselves, make mistakes and things like our hearts, kidneys, lungs and brains wear out until the situation above happens.
  
  In the other sense is this question ‘why are we not immortal?’. To this question I don’t have an answer. I suppose if we didn’t die we would have run out of space on the planet ages ago, but there must be other reasons depending on what you believe – not everything can be (or should be) explained by science (or scientists!).
  
  What do you think?
- Antonia Hamilton answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  from a physiology point of view, if the body stops working (from disease or old age or injury) then the person will die. from a philosophical point of view, I don’t know. But I do think it would be a bit odd to live for ever. Wouldn’t you get bored after a while?
- Douglas Blane answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  Great question. If we didn’t there wouldn’t be any room for the young people.
  
  To go into a bit more detail, it’s because once any animal has produced healthy offspring, nature doesn’t care what happens to them.
  
  Bit more detail again: All of us carry genes from people who lived long enough to have healthy children, who in turn grew up to have healthy children of their own.
  
  So none of our ancestors had genes that made them die before they had kids. But they all had genes that helped or didn’t stop them getting sick and dying when they got older. Scientists say there’s “no evolutionary pressure” to not get ill and die after you’ve had healthy kids.
  
  There are other ways of looking at it – such as damage to cells that builds up as time goes on – and there’s loads we still don’t know about ageing and dying.
  
  But you can bet that if living for a very long time after having kids helped our own kids to survive and have more healthy kids of their own, it would happen.
  
  That’s how evolution works.
  
  So I come back to my first answer: We need to die to get out the way of the young people.
- Hugh Roderick answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  I don’t know why we die. The evolutionary answer may be that if we, and all living things, didn’t die then they would soon be unable to get enough food to survive so the whole population would die out.

Question: Why do we die?

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