Fight Aging!

The present consensus on the evolution of aging is that it is an inevitable side effect of natural selection - aging isn't selected for per se, it is a byproduct. Evolution favors reproduction earlier in life rather than later in life, particularly in environments with high mortality due to disease or predation, and thus there is little pressure to select for mutations that enhance long-term maintenance of the body and brain. Looking at the examples of biology around us, the outcome of this process is near always biological systems that fail over time, in which their structure is optimized for early life success at the cost of late life health. This state of affairs is called antagonistic pleiotropy, that many (even most) biological features are great for health when young, terrible for health when old.

This consensus is not without its heretics, those who argue that aging is under selection, that degeneration of the individual is in some way advantageous to fitness of the species. This is often called "programmed aging". It is argued to occur, for example, because aging species might better adapt to periodic sizable environment changes, or as a result of group selection effects such a continual reduction of the breeding population via aging minimizing the odds of a population explosion. Many of these arguments are presented in the form of a model, and that is the case in today's open access paper. Whether the argument is interesting or not tends to depend on the fine details of the assumptions baked into the model, and is rarely apparent at a summary level.

Directional selection coupled with kin selection favors the establishment of senescence

Conventional wisdom in evolutionary theory considers aging as a non-selected byproduct of natural selection. Based on this, conviction aging was regarded as an inevitable phenomenon. It was also thought that in the wild organisms tend to die from diseases, predation, and other accidents before they could reach the time when senescence takes its course. Evidence has accumulated, however, that aging is not inevitable and there are organisms that show negative aging even. Furthermore, old age does play a role in the deaths of many different organisms in the wild also. The hypothesis of programmed aging posits that a limited lifespan can evolve as an adaptation (i.e., positively selected for) in its own right, partly because it can enhance evolvability by eliminating "outdated" genotypes. A major shortcoming of this idea is that non-aging sexual individuals that fail to pay the demographic cost of aging would be able to steal good genes by recombination from aging ones.

Here, we show by a spatially explicit, individual-based simulation model that aging can positively be selected for if a sufficient degree of kin selection complements directional selection. Under such conditions, senescence enhances evolvability because the rate of aging and the rate of recombination play complementary roles. The selected aging rate is highest at zero recombination (clonal reproduction). In our model, increasing extrinsic mortality favors evolved aging by making up free space, thereby decreasing competition and increasing drift, even when selection is stabilizing and the level of aging is set by mutation-selection balance. Importantly, higher extrinsic mortality is not a substitute for evolved aging under directional selection either. Reduction of relatedness decreases the evolved level of aging; chance relatedness favors non-aging genotypes. The applicability of our results depends on empirical values of directional and kin selection in the wild.

We found that aging can positively be selected for in a spatially explicit population model when sufficiently strong directional and kin selection prevail, even if reproduction is sexual. The view that there is a conceptual link between giving up clonal reproduction and evolving an aging genotype is supported by computational results.