On a Unifying Theory of Mortality: A Framework for Intropy

Abstract: Aging is the breakdown of life over time. A comprehensive, integrated, and universal mechanism to explain aging is lacking. We propose a unifying model reconciling existing theories with new ideas, organized around a concept we term “intropy”: the capacity of encoded information to produce and sustain functional and purposeful order. This model maintains aging results from the progressive loss of intropy through corruption of information-bearing nucleic acid that scrambles the chemical memory required to order life’s processes. The corruption decreases the efficiency of replicational, transcriptional, translational, and enzymatic outputs, amplifying functional inefficiency up a hierarchy of biological organization, from genome to organism. To sustain order against nearly infinite environmental stochasticity, evolution begot phenotypic diversity to protect and safeguard the transmission of relatively uncorrupted intropy to progeny (a “prime directive”), the original carrier left to continue a descent to a disordered state. Death results after crossing an irreversible efficiency threshold in which functional order is catastrophically lost and disorder rapidly rises, consistent with thermodynamic laws. While many cellular components sustain environmental damage, only corruption of nucleic acid, the sole irreplaceable template directing biological order, propagates functional disruption across every level of life's hierarchy. The informational corruption underlying aging reframes age-associated disease as a consequence of disordered biological instruction, thereby revealing nucleic acid change as the common process uniting aging, disease, and evolution. The theory reveals ways to significantly preserve order via engineered intropic protection, rendering the carrier relatively amortal.