Why do living things grow, age, and eventually die?
The Copying Party
Why do living things grow, age, and eventually die?
Look closely at anything alive — a sunflower, a beetle, a whale, you — and you'll catch it doing the same quiet trick. It is changing. Growing taller, growing older, eventually wearing out. Why? It turns out life is a story about copying, and what happens to a copy when it's been made a few billion times.
Everything alive is built from tiny rooms called cells. You started as just one. That single cell did something marvelous — it split in two. Then those two became four, four became eight, and on and on. Growing isn't magic. It's just cells throwing the world's longest copying party.
