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Originally Posted by reprise85
we were talking about why or if death is actually necessary for organisms, from an evolutionary standpoint
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That sounds like a cool topic.
I don't see why it would be necessary for any given organism, from an evolutionary standpoint. It seems to me that organisms die because natural selection doesn't make organisms "optimal," it just makes them "good enough" to pass on their genes. And since reproductive age is a window of time out of an entire lifespan, there isn't really any selective pressure to lengthen organisms' lifespans after reproductive age. I guess some organisms don't really ever get too old to reproduce, but even then, natural selection would only really favour lifespans long enough that they've produced enough to keep their genes in the pool.
But from the standpoint of not a single organism, but a species, or even the biosphere in general, it seems that things need to die in order for new things to live, because there's just a limited amount of bio-matter in the world. Of course, in a world where nothing died, maybe nothing would really be born either, and you've just have a stable population of the same immortal organisms. I wonder if entropy keeps that from being a possibility, though.