The other is that there are opportunities for selective deletion of germ cells that just don't make the grade. My question concerns an understanding that I have that the objective of a life system is to reproduce itself. But in fact natural selection doesn't work quite like that because if you carried on reproducing for longer and you produced a larger number of offspring then you would leave extra gene copies of yourself in the next generation. So really selection is geared towards maximising the number of offspring. Well, the idea that we go on after the age of reproduction doesn't apply in the vast majority of organisms.
Most organisms remain fertile until the ends of their life spans.
Their fertility will decline with ageing because ageing takes its toll on the reproductive functions as it does on other systems. But there is generally no limit to the reproductive capacity of the organism. Helen Blau from Stanford University. On the topic of oxidative damage causing DNA damage it's been thought, and I wonder what you think of this hypothesis, that in humans we've evolved so that we accumulate uric acid whereas other species that have a shorter life span have developed ways of eliminating or degrading uric acid. But it's thought that perhaps it acts as an antioxidant and protects against this DNA damage.