—After performing the miracles that take us from conception to birth, and then to sexual
maturation and adulthood, natural selection was unable to favor the development of a more
elementary mechanism that would simply maintain those earlier miracles forever. The
manifestations of this failure are called aging. Because few feral animals age, evolution
could not have favored a genetic program for age changes. Natural selection favors animals
that are most likely to become reproductively successful by developing better survival …