What is ageing?

[soonny]

How does time age us? What's going on with our body when we age? Why does our skin wrinkle? What is the essence of ageing? Why do we grow weaker the older we get? Why do we die of ageing? Sorry... I know this question is a little radical, but I was always wondering about this.

[Ewood27]

Mother Nature designed us with one aim only, to procreate and ensure the survival of the species. When we are very young we are cute and appeal to the parental/maternal instincts of protective adults. When we reach the age of puberty we develop traits that make us attractive to the opposite sex. Once we are past child-bearing age Mother Nature isn't interested in us any more and our bodies go into decline and begin to break down and wear out. We call that ageing. How does it age us? Too darned fast!

[gazzawazza]

Perfect answer Ewood!!!

[Hamish]

A brilliant question and one that is keeping people bussy the world over. I shall try to give some sort of an answer.

The cells in your body are forever dividing to provide you with new skin, liver etc. (although some such as nerves never regrow). It is thought that as this process proceeds certain protines are passed on in smaller and smaller amounts, but as these are essencial for cell division and keeping you healthy, the tissue of your body becomes renewed less and less efficiently. Elasticily in skin is lost (hence wrinkles) skin becomes thin and papery. Muscles become slack and so on. Some things will cause this process to proceed quicker, ie smoking, some things may help stave off aspects, ie excersising muscles to keep them tight. But in the end your body will slowly slide into decline.

What a depressing thing to be writing about on a Monday moring! I hope this helps.

[soonny]

So there isn't any rational explanation to ageing? it just happens just like the sun rises and fall everyday? hmm... that's rather disappointing. I thought if we can know what's going on, we might be able to stop the process. Sounds like fiction? :p

[xyzzy@bok]

agree with ewood. 4 stars to ewood.

[soonny]

Unfortunately, I don't really agree with Ewood. His answer didn't really answered any of my questions up there. Unlike Hamish, who at least tried to give me a clue of what's going on. Thanks. I shall search for the answer elsewhere.

[bluedolphin]

On a cellular level ...cells can replicate only so many times. There are thingys called Telomeres that are reduced at every replication so when theTelomeres run out the process of renewing stops and so we get older. ( all this is from memory of a prog on TV). and isn't time a man made concept?

[rja211077]

Ewood's answer didn't answer the question at all and only begged the follow up question "yes but WHY do we get past child-bearing age?".