Aging: The Fading Signal of Natural Selection

otropy between reproduction and survival in turn adjusts the timing of the late life plateaus comprise a most striking confirmation of the evolutionary approach. Despite these predictive successes, aging continues to be almost reflexively thought of by many as the inexorable accumulation of cellular and physiological damage and wear with age. Even researchers who know of the decline of Hamilton’s forces have often assumed, as Rose points out, that this decline fits with the inexorable damage accumulation thesis. This old thinking casts a shadow not only on much aging research but its application in traditional pharmaceutical approaches to the “diseases of aging” and in clinical gerontology. Now in the age of genomics, we can test aspects of the model with rich new data sets. In comparing the genomes of longlived flies with flies of ordinary life span, it would be fascinating to search for altered expression levels (via microarray studies as J. L. G. suggests in his commentary on “What is Aging?”) in genes at succeeding stages in life history. Another potentially A commentary on