commonplace book redux

The interesting point is that chemical signals of old age need not in any normal sense be deleterious in themselves. For instance, suppose that it incidentally happens to be a fact that a substance S is more concentrated in the bodies of old individuals than of young individuals. S in itself might be quite harmless, perhaps some substance in the food which accumulates in the body over time. But automatically, any gene that just happened to exert a deleterious effect in the presence of S, but which otherwise had a good effect, would be positively selected in the gene pool, and would in effect be a gene ‘for’ dying of old age. The cure would simply be to remove S from the body.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2006