Science Quote by George C. Williams

Williams is doing something sneaky here: he turns aging from a gloomy inevitability into a bookkeeping problem. If a trait reliably makes it into the next generation, natural selection keeps “auditing” it. The machinery that builds eggs and sperm, and the information inside them, has to be good enough to copy itself forward. So it gets defended, repaired, and quality-controlled in a way your knees and arteries never quite do. In that light, senescence isn’t a cosmic curse; it’s what happens to biological features that stop mattering to reproduction.

The intent is pointedly anti-romantic. Williams, one of the architects of modern evolutionary thinking about aging, is arguing against the idea that organisms are designed for long, graceful persistence. Selection is ruthless but narrowly scoped: it favors whatever boosts reproductive success, then increasingly shrugs as you move past the window where reproduction is likely. The body becomes a negotiated settlement between early-life performance and late-life maintenance, and maintenance loses votes once it stops paying dividends.

The subtext carries a rebuke to human exceptionalism. We like to treat longevity as an obvious goal. Williams frames it as a side effect that has to be purchased with evolutionary currency. “Anything passed on” doesn’t senesce because the lineage can’t afford decay in its handoff mechanism; decay there would be self-erasing. Everything else is, in evolutionary terms, more expendable than we care to admit.

Context matters: this line sits inside the broader mid-20th-century shift toward gene-centered selection and theories like antagonistic pleiotropy, where genes that help you reproduce early can harm you later. It’s not that nature “wants” you to age. It’s that it often doesn’t pay to prevent it.