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Notes -
There's a famous legend about Henry Ford trying to engineer cars this way - if the car you buy has ten parts that might wear out, but in practice only nine of them ever fail, doesn't that mean you probably paid too much for an over-engineered design on the tenth?
If the lifetime of your car (or your body) was actually strictly determined by a L=min_i(L_i) formula, in fact, evolution would have a really tough time improving that - once you get L_i = L_j for some i,j, you can't improve L by improving either component, but only with a change that improves both at once. I think evolution is helped here by the addition of uncertainty - even when something like "heart failure kills people before cancer can" was true at some point in some average sense, there'd still be individuals getting lucky with their heart or unlucky with cancer and so cancer-fighting mutations would still give non-zero fitness improvements.
Perhaps a more subtle problem is that evolution doesn't care about the longevity of your body, only the fitness of your genes. By the time your biological mortality is really catching up to you, you're supposed to have a few kids and a bunch of grandkids running around, and from the point of view of an allele's frequency your life is only worth approximately as much as two of the former or four of the latter. So if age has made your body a significantly less efficient carrier of the genes you share, then evolution would be happy to put you out on an ice floe (as in a somewhat less mythical metaphor) rather than let you drag them down with you. Not only do alleles that reduce mortality become less useful in the face of different causes of death, but also in the face of other causes of weakness!
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