Tell your friend that there are literally THOUSANDS of species on Earth that do not die of old age.
Examples: lobsters, crocodiles, many species of fish, almost all protozoans and bacteria, etc.
Dying of old age is extremely rare in the natural world. So rare that it can basically be ignored as a cause of death in many population studies. Animals need to reproduce because death is omnipresent -- disease, predators, weather, con-specific fighting all take their toll.
Now, if an animal is very long-lived, hardy, and difficult to kill, then it normally will reproduce rather slowly. A good example is humanity. We are one of the slowest-reproducing critters in the world. A typical female produces maybe 10 kids in her lifetime, and each kid takes well over a decade to mature physically - -- then it usually takes several more years before they're able to function socially.
Compare to the immortal lobster -- it spawns ten thousand eggs a year. During its lifetime, a given lobster might spawn a million young. Of all those young, on the average only two (2) survive to adulthood. So much for being immortal.
Sandy P.
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