What is aging?
Aging can be defined as a rise in the risk of death due to intrinsic causes, implying the failure of one or more organs or systems vital to life. In simple terms, we don’t die due to old age but rather due to a failure of organ/s that are too old to weak to keep working correctly.
There are several schools of thought on this subject. The first dominant school argues that aging is caused by damage, forms of wear and tear to cells and tissues, and that damage leads to characteristic changes and failures in our biology. The second, lesser school argues that aging is an evolved program of distinct changes and failures in our biology that cause damage and eventual death.
It is a mark of how complex aging is under the hood that the research community can accurately measure all sorts of damage, changes, and failures that accompany aging but still have room to argue over whether damage causes change or change causes damage.