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Comment by phillmv | Hacker News Reader

It's how any species gets to iterate. The old have to die off to make room for the young.

We're not Drosophila, we're people with minds capable of exploring and understanding a world that goes beyond biological evolution. We don't have to use death to iterate, we do it using general intelligence (it outperforms evolution by a factor of a bazillion). Also, not all organisms use preprogrammed death as a mechanism to iterate, ask an amoeba sometime.

All this talk about the inevitability of death and how that's supposdly a good thing is basically just pseudo-religious reasoning in defense of a status quo that is rapidly crumbling away.

Right, but if there is actually any selection for aging and death in organisms (maybe there is, I'm not sure), it's not useful anymore. There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population, and it's therefore no longer true that our children should be genetically superior.

Maybe not genetically superior, but certainly culturally stronger. Old people have old ways of thinking.

And the way of thinking isn't constant. It changes over time. A 15 year old you, a 25 year old you and a 50 year old you are all different people. A 500 year old you will most probably be a different person.

There are people who resist change and disapprove of all viewpoints other their own, but I doubt it's an age thing. I see a lot of young people opposing gay marriages for instance.

We think differently as we age. Have you spent any amount of time arguing with old people? You can't teach an old dog new tricks, etc.

Ideas tend to propagate in generations - it's often necessary for the old guard to die off before a new idea will be accepted, whether this is in art, or science, or politics or whatever.

As new people crop up that aren't reputationally invested in a certain idea it allows more ideas to be considered seriously, etc.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Good to see ageism is alive and well.

I know a guy who did a bunch of market research for a senior care product. They found technology use, on average, dips in the 60s and then starts increasing again in the seventies.

different != superior.

>There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population

Sure there is. The fitness function is just different from what you or I consider 'optimal' or 'superior'. We're still becoming more resistent to disease, even if the future may have more in common with trailer park people than urban elites.

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