  Aging is always present, tailoring our interactions with others and
postulating a finite lifespan during which we are able to exercise them. We
consider the prisoner's dilemma game on a square lattice, and examine how
quenched age distributions and different aging protocols influence the
evolution of cooperation when taking the life experience and knowledge
accumulation into account as time passes. In agreement with previous studies,
we find that a quenched assignment of age to players, introducing heterogeneity
to the game, substantially promotes cooperative behavior. Introduction of aging
and subsequent death as a coevolutionary process may act detrimental on
cooperation but enhances it efficiently if the offspring of individuals that
have successfully passed their strategy is considered newborn. We study
resulting age distributions of players, and show that the heterogeneity is
vital yet insufficient for explaining the observed differences in cooperator
abundance on the spatial grid. The unexpected increment of cooperation levels
can be explained by a dynamical effect that has a highly selective impact on
the propagation of cooperator and defector states.
