" The survival of an older person is of no evolutionary consequence since that person can no longer reproduce—unless one wants to argue for the role of grandparents in prolonging the lives of their descendants. It might even, in a Darwinian sense, be better to remove the elderly before they can use up any more resources that might otherwise go to the young. In that case, you could say that there is something almost altruistic about the diseases of aging. Just as programmed cell death, apoptosis, cleanly eliminates damaged cells from the body, so do the diseases of aging clear up the clutter of biologically useless older people—only not quite so cleanly. And this perspective may be particularly attractive at a time, like now, when the dominant discourse on aging focuses on the deleterious economic effects of largely aging populations. If we didn’t have inflammatory diseases to get the job done, we might have to turn to euthanasia. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer