Considering a Role for Infectious Disease in the Evolution of Aging

If interested in the evolution of aging, today's open access paper opens with a very readable tour of the history of thought on this topic, as well as the more recent debate between different classes of hypotheses that seek to explain the evolution of aging. The authors are opinionated, and the path leads to their favored theory, involving population-wide effects driven by infectious disease that do not require group selection, but it nonetheless covers a lot of ground and makes for an educational read. Theories of aging are much debated, perhaps in part because there are so many exceptions to the rule that must be explained away. The long lives and negligible senescence of naked mole-rats, the apparent physical immortality of hydra, the large variance in life span between near neighbor species in similar ecological niches, and so forth. As things stand, the mainstream position on the evolution of aging is that it results from natural selection operating more strongly on early life features than on later life features. Systems and mechanisms are selected for their ability to improve early reproductive success, regardless of whether or not they fall apart later in life. Aging is inevitable, but only a side-effect of the dominance of early reproductive success as a strategy. Alternatively, and as the authors note, it is possible that aging provides some sort of benefit in evolutionary competition, and is thus under direct selection. The range of possible benefits are sub...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs