They're evidence that aging may not be an inherent trait, but a product of how species evolve in given environments—and that evolution may actually be programming species, including humans, to die.

The tantalizing prospect is the subject of a new study, "Programmed death is favored by natural selection in spatial systems," from some top flight complex systems researchers and biologists. They've used a brand new mathematical model to flip the traditional understanding of the aging process nearly on its head. If its results prove accurate, it would have massive ramifications for how we understand the process of aging itself—and may lend hope to those seeking to reprogram humans to live even longer.

The bound-to-be controversial idea is being put forward by Yaneer Bar-Yam, the head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), Donald E. Ingber, the founding director of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and Justin Werfel, a researcher affiliated with both. The team's new work has been published in the Physical Review of Letters, and it argues that the "mathematics underpinning our understanding of evolution is fundamentally flawed."