What is Error Catastrophe of Aging?
The error catastrophe of aging, originally proposed by Leslie Orgel in 1963, argues that copying errors in DNA and the incorrect placement of amino acids in protein synthesis could aggregate over the lifetime of an organism and eventually cause a catastrophic breakdown in the form of obvious aging. Experimental tests which have attempted to determine differences in the nucleotide sequences of specific proteins that correlate with age have always failed, so the theory has largely been dismissed. Copying errors have been selected against extremely strongly over the course of evolution because the genetic material is the most evolutionarily important part of the entire organism, and the organism can in fact be viewed as a “survival machine” for the genetic material. In vertebrates, evolution has had to wrestle with the most imaginable negative consequence of copying errors imaginable – cancer – and thus has DNA copying mechanisms that work at extremely high fidelities. Because these mecha
