Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation · HackerPapers discussions

Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation — mentioned by reasonattlm

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:37:51 GMT

Entropy arguments for the primacy of aging are fairly silly. For one, there are actually species that appear to be essentially immortal. Secondly, the germline. Cellular systems are clearly capable in principle of indefinitely maintaining themselves against entropy by either asymmetric division in which molecular waste is partitioned into one child cell (single cell life) or leveraging asymmetric division to replace worn parts with good parts (multicellular life). To explain why aging exists and is so prevalent in biology one has to look at the level above physics, and that debate largely…

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Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation — mentioned by reasonattlm

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 10:46:39 GMT

No. Here are some views on aging that capture present thinking on the topic. https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.100640 "Why do humans live longer than other higher primates? Why do women live longer than men? What is the significance of the menopause? Answers to these questions may be sought by reference to the mechanisms by which human aging might have evolved. Here, an evolutionary hypothesis is presented that could answer all three questions, based on the following suppositions. First, that the evolution of increased human longevity was driven by increased late-life reproduction by men in…

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Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation — mentioned by reasonattlm

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:49:50 GMT

The argument seems essentially similar to theories on the evolution of aging that suggest we age because senescence improves evolutionary fitness when the environment changes on a comparatively short timescale [1]. The world changes, therefore a race to the bottom arises for ways to improve fitness that also happen to make life miserable and short for individuals. Miserable and short outcompetes hydra-like immortality or naked-mole-rat-like negligible senescence in the vast majority of niches. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4649

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Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation — mentioned by reasonattlm

Fri, 13 May 2016 14:17:48 GMT

The evolution of aging is an arms race to the bottom. Very few species can succeed without aging once any competitors evolve aging, and this happened very early on. Here is thinking on "we age because the world changes." Of course what is great for evolutionary success has nothing to do with what is great for the individual, and the two should not be confused. http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4649 "Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence…

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Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation — mentioned by exratione

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 12:36:45 GMT

Here are a grab bag of overviews on evolutionary theories of aging, of which there are many, and these don't even cover some of the more recent epicycles, such as explanations for runaway longevity competition in some sessile species: http://www.senescence.info/evolution_of_aging.html http://longevity-science.org/Evolution.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing Group selection isn't as dead as you might think; I've seen it show up in a number of places in evolutionary considerations of aging over the years. But then the field of aging as a whole is very reluctant to let go of…

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