Ouroboros on Michael Rose's SENSE

Over at Ouroboros, comments on SENSE, Michael Rose's consideration of his research as it impacts the "repair damage to cure aging" viewpoint of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS): "Rose concludes that life-extension therapeutics must address the issue of age-specific adaptation in order to be effective ... In the evolutionary view, increasing risk of mortality is the consequence of a failure to adapt to the selection-pressure landscape specific to a particular age; because post-reproductive lifespan is largely (but not always) masked from selection, it is easy to see how such age-specific failures of adaptation might occur. The 'mortality plateaus' to which the author refers are life-history periods of constant, rather than increasing, mortality risk. Rose argues that the existence of these plateaus in the survival curves of many species imply that accumulation of irreparable damage is - at the very least - not the whole cause of aging. Therefore, the argument goes, reversing this damage cannot be sufficient to prevent or reverse aging as such."

Link: http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/evolutionary-theories-of-aging-as-applied-to-lifespan-extension/