The Bio-Ontological Status of Aging: Atavism or Adaptation?
The aim of the article is to reveal the bio-ontological essence of the process of aging. Even today aging is often viewed as a counterbiological process that is opposed to the self-preservation and homeostasis of the living. This leads to a reductionist understanding of the essence of aging, its equalization to a physical or chemical phenomenon in its nature (for example, biological consequences of the second law of thermodynamics) or to a genocentrical paradigm when it is understood just as an installed hereditary program. The article justifies a different point of view: aging, undoubtedly demonstrating negative aspects and being part of the “insufficiency” of the living, has, nevertheless, a purely biological, adaptive meaning. The author first of all uses dialectical and system methods in order to show that aging is a contradictory process which has both positive and negative effects on biological structures of different levels and to use an old idea that every biological system is much more than a simple sum of its parts. The research proves that aging is not purely destructive but has an important role in maintaining biological homeostasis. A number of phenomena (autophagy, cell apoptosis, work of immunity, etc.) show that the higher level of organization of life exists largely due to control over the number and multiplication of elements on the underlying level, to the active containment of their proliferation. It is important not only for the existence of multicellular organisms but also for superorganism systems (population, biocenosis, ecosystem, etc.). Aging, therefore, can be viewed as a “slow” variant of “phenoptosis” (V.P. Skulachev) not only because of destructive physicochemical tendencies growing inside the organism with time, but rather because of more “sophisticated” processes of biological autopoiesis. Living is not just a static self-preserving, but a system dynamically reproducing by self “re-assembly”, in which the survival of the whole dialectically involves the periodical dying of certain parts. Aging and death of elements are among foundations for their collective endosymbiosis within a holistic biosystem; thus, aging cannot be reduced, for instance, to the process of a simple growth of entropy. In some way, aging shows that death (as its result) is not only an opposition of life but is incorporated in it, too. Moreover, aging is also dialectically balanced by protective and regenerative processes (the concept “vitauсt” by V.V. Frolkis), which permanently try to compensate its negative impact. Probably, the main line of future medical progress in the sphere of aging will be connected with these processes’ activization. Consequently, it can be concluded that aging is not a harmful atavism but rather a kind of complex adaptation. Therefore, it is not aging itself but the intention to its full cancellation that is a contra-biological tendency. Aging can be viewed as a vivid example of a deep dialectical, truly Heraclitian, unity of such contradictions as life and death, when self-preservation of the living goes through the limitation or dying of its particular components.