Does Aging Stop? reveals the most paradoxical finding of recent aging research: the cessation of demographic aging. The authors show that aging stops at the level of the individual organism, and explain why evolution allows this. The implications of this counter-intuitive conclusion are profound, and aging research now needs to accept three uncomfortable truths. First, aging is not a cumulative physiological process. Second, the fundamental theory that is
required to explain, manipulate, and probe the phenomena of aging comes from evolutionary biology. Third, strong-inference experimental strategies for aging must be founded in evolutionary research, not cell or
molecular biology. The result of fifteen years of research bringing together new applications of evolutionary theory, new models for demography, and massive experimentation, Does Aging Stop? advances an entirely new foundation for the scientific study of aging.
Does Aging Stop? reveals the most paradoxical finding of recent aging research: the cessation of demographic aging. The authors show that aging stops at the level of the individual organism, and explain why evolution allows this. The implications of this counter-intuitive conclusion are profound, and aging research now needs to accept three uncomfortable truths. First, aging is not a cumulative physiological process. Second, the fundamental theory that is
required to explain, manipulate, and probe the phenomena of aging comes from evolutionary biology. Third, strong-inference experimental strategies for aging must be founded in evolutionary research, not cell or
molecular biology. The result of fifteen years of research bringing together new applications of evolutionary theory, new models for demography, and massive experimentation, Does Aging Stop? advances an entirely new foundation for the scientific study of aging.
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: A Third Phase of Life
2. Discovery of Late Life
3. Late Life is Predicted by Hamiltonian Evolutionary Theory
4. Late-Life Mortality and Fecundity Plateaus Evolve
5. Genetics of Late Life involve Antagonistic Pleiotropy
6. Demography of Late Life with Lifelong Heterogeneity
7. Evolution of Lifelong Heterogeneity
8. Experimental Tests of Lifelong Heterogeneity
9. Death Spirals
10. Physiology of Late Life
11. Late Life in Human Populations
12. Aging Stops: Late Life, Evolutionary Biology, and
Gerontology
Appendix
References
Index
Laurence Mueller is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are
in life-history evolution, aging, and the population genetic
aspects of forensic DNA typing. Dr. Mueller is the author of over
100 research papers in these fields as well as two books: Stability
in Model Populations and Evolution and Ecology of the Organism.
Casandra Rauser is the Assistant Director of Research Development
for the School of Biological Sciences at the University of
California, Irvine.
Michael Rose is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University
of California, Irvine. He is the author of Evolutionary Biology of
Aging (OUP, 1991), and was awarded the Busse Research Prize by the
World Congress of Gerontology in 1997.
"As an attempt to justify the existence of plateaus as direct outcomes of natural selection, the book is as good as it gets. The authors do a thorough job of presenting their ideas, along with the models and data they believe back these ideas up." -- Thomas B. L. Kirkwood, Institute for Ageing & Health, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
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