The Role of Aging in Human Evolutionary Development

• Published in: Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vol. 90; no. 6; pp. 730 - 737
• Main Authors: Shabalin, V. N., Shatokhina, S. N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Moscow Pleiades Publishing 01-11-2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Aging; Biosphere; Chemistry/Food Science; Chemists; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Engineering; Environment; Gerontology; Life Sciences; Mathematical models; Ontogeny; Physicians; Physicists; Point of View; Social Sciences; Structural members; biological information; self-organization; systems organization; committing; metabolism; evolution; aging; living matter; biosphere; local organization
• ISSN: 1019-3316; 1555-6492
• DOI: 10.1134/S1019331620060301

Currently, the number of works that study body aging mechanisms is rapidly growing in the world. This problem occupies not only philosophers, biologists, and physicians but also representatives of the exact sciences—physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. Experimental studies are being conducted at various levels of the structural organization of living matter, as well as theoretical studies, and all sorts of conceptual and mathematical models are being built. At the same time, there is still no unified generally accepted theory of aging in gerontology, and even the very concept of
aging
remains blurred. In addition, most people, including researchers, consider the aging process mainly through the prism of their personal dramatic perception of age-related changes in their own bodies. However, the biological significance of aging, under an objective assessment of this process, appears in a completely different quality—as a universal, permanent, unidirectional physiological process of the structural development of living matter, proceeding in unity with time. The creation of structures of a higher level is impossible without the elimination of less perfect forms with the subsequent use of their constituent elements in further development. Such elimination can only occur through the mechanisms of aging and death. Throughout the life of an individual, the structural elements of his body acquire higher structural and functional properties and, getting into the “melting pot” of the biosphere after death, increase the quality of its integral structure. Thus, each newly emerging organism rises on the mighty shoulders of the previous biological structures and in ontogeny creates new, more perfect structural elements, providing a step in forward motion—the evolutionary development of living matter. At the present stage of evolution, the accumulated amount of information has led to the creation of man—a carrier of thinking matter, capable of carrying out an abstracted analysis of the environment, encoding the collected information, and transforming it into technical tools and technologies.