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Notes -
There are animals, like jellyfish, that are biologically immortal in the sense they don't age.
You could argue that the first progenitor of life, whatever color of microbe that was, is still alive. During mitosis or meiosis, both the daughter cells have equal claim of being the original, if one insists on using that term.
Jellyfish have existed largely unchanged for half a billion years. If aging was always bad, I'd expect such exuberant youth would have been stamped out by now.
It seems to me far more likely that aging is a very difficult problem for evolution to solve in complicated, macroscopic organisms. Human females are one of the few (or only) animals that experience menopause, which is postulated to help them divert their resources towards their offspring's young instead of producing more. That seems like a consequence of blind evolution being unable to find a more optimal solution, and kludging together a fix.
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