Perfect Repair Systems

What is the source of our aging? Are we similar to inanimate objects around which age via "wear and tear"?

It turns out not. People, like all living things and their cells are self-repairing systems, cars are not. Any molecular biology textbook will describe several repair systems for both DNA and cytoplastic components. Another way of saying this is that cells and people use the energy of the environment (food) for not only movement (as cars do), but also to maintain, with the help of repair systems among
other things, something called cellular homeostasis, or cellular equilibrium roughly speaking. If the repair systems were perfect, which they are not unfortunately, if all the damage and "wear and tear" were repaired perfectly, we could go on living much longer. We are also able to - as anyone could tell you - regenerate parts of our cells in case of wounds. Some lizards can, in fact, generate entire parts of their bodies.

A natural question then arises: "If evolution has developed everything imaginable, why hasn't it developed perfect repair cellular systems?"

To answer the question, consider the following thought experiment. Suppose that several million years ago there was a species of, say, fish that developed a perfect repair systems and as a result couls achieve a lifespan that extended to several hundred or even thousands of years.

If so, why don't we see the species today? Where did it disappear? The answer is that by attaining perfect repair system, the species lost the capacity for mutation and variation and consequently for evolution. It was soon outcompeted by a species which, though mortal on the individual level, carried superior mutations as a species. Evolution presumes variance, selection and mortality. Aging is the cost we pay for evolution and vice versa - extending aging would slow down evolution, and complete immortality the end of evolution.

So if human species developed perfect repair systems, not through evolution, but artificially in a lab (as we have done so much else) would it mean the end of species? Maybe in the long run, say in few thousands years, when we would be outcompeted by apes with superior mutations, but that's not my top concern right now as our clocks are ticking minutes and hours, not in thousands of years.