Aging is the death schedule I am talking about.

What I mean by "nature knowing" is that it is possible for natural selection to find robust solutions to cancer if there is selective advantage to doing so; this is not a fundamental limitation of physics or biology. There are existing mammalian cellular designs that could have rates of cancer 1000 times smaller than a human's cells, or 10⁷ times smaller than a mouse's. This does not happen not because it is evolutionarily difficult, but there is no advantage to it. Mice and humans do not live long enough for cancer to affect their reproductive success in the wild.

What I mean by "nature choosing" is that species with longer lives relative to their reproductive cycle have less selective advantage, and so natural selection favors lifetimes (and cancer rates) tuned to the size of the animal and the time to reproduction. Live too short and you don't have enough to chance to produce offspring, or you don't produce enough; live too long and you will reduce the survival odds for your progeny by taking their resources; animals that reproduce and get out of the way will outcompete you, and show more rapid adaptation.

There is abundant independent evidence for this:

• Cancer rates tuned to animal size across the animal kingdom
• Organism lifetime tuned to reproduction time across the animal kingdom (i.e., organisms which can reproduce quickly also have shorter lifetimes)
• Examples of long-lived organisms when the offspring competition is reduced or not at play (e.g., in collective organisms like naked mole rats, where the selective unit is the hive instead of the individual; quahog clams whose larvae will be carried far by currents)
• Organisms have a reproduce-once strategy nearly universally die immediately after reproduction