Vital rates from the action of mutation accumulation

Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success. Here we show that both theory and phenomenology are consistent with programmed death. Spatial evolutionary models show that self-limited lifespan robustly results in long-term benefit to a lineage; longer-lived variants may have a reproducti...

Trends in human longevity are puzzling, especially when considering the limits of human longevity. Partially, the conflicting assertions are based upon demographic evidence and the interpretation of survival and mortality curves using the Gompertz model and the Weibull model; these models are sometimes considered to be incomplete in describing the entire curves. In this paper a new model is proposed to take the place of the traditional models. We directly analysed the rectang...

Author's early work on aging is developed to yield a relationship between life spans and the velocity of aging. The mathematical analysis shows that the mean extent of the advancement of aging throughout one's life is conserved, or equivalently, the product of the mean life span, and the mean rate of aging is constant. The result is in harmony with our experiences: It accounts for the unlimited replicability of tumor cells, and predicts the prolonged life spans of hibernating...

The chronological age used in demography describes the linear evolution of the life of a living being. The chronological age cannot give precise information about the exact developmental stage or aging processes an organism has reached. On the contrary, the biological age (or epigenetic age) represents the true evolution of the tissues and organs of the living being. Biological age is not always linear and sometimes proceeds by discontinuous jumps. These jumps can be positive...

Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest that aging is an adaptation, selected for its own sake. But aging contributes only negatively to fitness of the individual. What kind of selection model would permit aging to emerge as a population-level adaptation? I explore the thesis that...

The present review deals with the computer simulation of biological ageing as well as its demographic consequences for industrialized societies.

Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell divisions, providing a framework for understanding how mutation rates depend on sex, age and absolute time. We show that the accrual of mutations should track cell divisions not only when mutations are replicative in origin but also when they are...

The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the dynamics of survival analysis, traditionally employed in clinical trials and reliability analysis in engineering. We derive a general solution for the model in the form of a product, and then a continuous approximation to the solution via the renewal equation describing age-structu...

Evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random changes (the method employed by evolution) is much more likely to be harmful than advantageous, potentially lowering the chances of reproduction of the affected individuals. The proposition of ageing as a nonadaptive phenomenon is robust and nearly universally acknowl...

We use a simple model for biological ageing to study the mortality of the population, obtaining a good agreement with the Gompertz law. We also simulate the same model on a square lattice, considering different strategies of parental care. The results are in agreement with those obtained earlier with the more complicated Penna model for biological ageing. Finally, we present the sexual version of this simple model.