>>11080665Because aging is the inevitable errors in replication. The biggest problem by far is the way our cell replication works. Special enymes cut open a small "pocket" in the DNA strand, and both sides are copied by polymerases. However, because one side of the strand is effectively "backwards", one polymeras has to kind of jump back and forth in order to copy it, leading to small errors when it "jumps off the edge" of the strand and thus misses one or two bases nearest to the end of the strand. This is why the telomeres exist, to protect the important stuff for as long as possible.
Now, the problem is that the only feasible way for the second side of the DNA strand to be properly scanned is for the entire thing to separate while its in transcription, which would effectively halt all operations within the cell whenever it is dividing, and thus kill the organism when cell division happens. The only other way to avoid this issue is to be bacteria and have a circular DNA strand without any ends, which only works if youre a unicellular organism with a tiny amount of genetic information. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, everyone, and have a great day. Also not sure how coherent this came across, so sorry about that.
