Abstract
Senescence, the physiological deterioration resulting in an increase in mortality and decline in fertility with age, is widespread in the animal kingdom and has often been regarded as an inescapable feature of all organisms. This essay briefly describes the history of the evolutionary theoretical ideas on senescence. The canonical evolutionary theories suggest that increasing mortality and decreasing fertility should be ubiquitous. However, increasing empirical data demonstrates that senescence may not be as universal a feature of life as once thought and that a diversity of demographic trajectories exists. These empirical observations support theoretical work indicating that a wide range of mortality and fertility trajectories is indeed possible, including senescence, negligible senescence and even negative senescence (improvement). Although many mysteries remain in the field of biogerontology, it is clear that senescence is not inevitable.
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Notes
Diversity also exists within species: this is clearly shown by the human trajectories in our 2014 study, but there are also non-human examples. For example, painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) (not included in our study) show more rapid mortality senescence in some populations (Warner et al. 2016) than others (Congdon et al. 2003), a difference that Warner et al. (2016) attribute to differences in extrinsic mortality between the populations. It is also likely that differences in methodology among studies can cause variation in apparent senescence trajectories.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Julia Barthold, Johan Dahlgren, Roberto Salguero-Gómez and two anonymous referees for comments on this manuscript and Annette Baudisch for her ground breaking work and stimulating discussion on this area over several years. We thank the organisers of the British Society for Research on Aging for their invitation to speak at the 2016 meeting in Durham, which prompted this essay. We thank the Max Planck Society for financial support.
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Jones, O.R., Vaupel, J.W. Senescence is not inevitable. Biogerontology 18, 965–971 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10522-017-9727-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10522-017-9727-3