Why aging is an unnatural process? An argument from Atul Gawande

There is a formulation of the argument on why aging should be considered as an unnatural process by Atul Gawande in the current The Way We Age Now report in The New Yorker:
“..scientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us. After all, for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past couple of hundred years—the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. (Research suggests that subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years.) Today, the average life span in developed countries is almost eighty years. If human life spans depend on our genetics, then medicine has got the upper hand. We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time. So when we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one.”

Update: Derya Unutmaz‘s critic of this argument on FightAging! and more: “This is gross misconception. The reason why the average life span was so low was because most of the deaths occurred during childhood and through infections during adulthood. If one corrects for the infection survival and looks at life expectancy at older age, there has only been about 6-8 years increase in overall life extension in the last 100 years. Thus, the data strongly argues for biological program of aging, and that at current time we are not yet freaks living much beyond our appointed time, just that many more of us reaching the near maximal set program.”