With neurons, nature developed biological immortality at the cellular level, but the animals needed to die to make way for the new generations, to allow for increased evolvability, or evolution rate, of the species. Even in lowly rodents the neurons are capable of vastly outliving these short lived mammals.
“Neurons do not have a fixed lifespan,” says Magrassi. “They may survive forever. It’s the body that contains them that die. If you put them in a longer-living body, they survive as long as the new body allows them to. It increases our hope that extending lifespan will not necessarily result in brain depleted of neurons.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/neurons-could-outlive-the-bodies-that-contain-them
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1217505110
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