I&#x27;m a cancer biologist, so I appreciate the relation to oncogenesis. But you said &quot;It is there for (probably) many reasons&quot;. This is what I am contending; aging is simply there, because that is what happened. &#x27;Reason&#x27; is a judgment we apply, and it&#x27;s important to appreciate that much of what exists is not driven by anything we might call &quot;reason&quot;. I do not believe that the collection of phenomenon we call &quot;aging&quot; is uniformly the product of adaptive consequence. Notably, we die in part because evolution simply doesn&#x27;t care, or isn&#x27;t able, to keep us alive indefinitely.