Universal Mortality Law, Life Expectancy and Immortality

Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields the exact law, whose universality from yeast to humans is unprecedented, and suggests its unusual mechanism. Singularities of the law demonstrate new kind of stepwise adaptation. The law proves that universal mortality is an evolutionary b...

Exact law of mortality dynamics in changing populations and environment is derived. The law is universal for all species, from single cell yeast to humans. It includes no characteristics of animal- environment interactions (metabolism etc) which are a must for life. Such law is unique for live systems with their homeostatic self-adjustment to environment. Its universal dynamics for all animals, with their drastically different biology, evolutionary history, and complexity, is...

Demographic data and recent experiments verify earlier predictions that mortality has short (few percent of the life span) memory of the previous life history, may be significantly decreased, reset to its value at a much younger age, and (until certain age) eliminated. Such mortality dynamics is demonstrated to be characteristic only of evolutionary unprecedented protected populations. When conditions improve, their mortality decreases stepwise. At crossovers the rate of decr...

Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality law, which is specific for their evolutionary unprecedented conditions, yet universal for species as evolutionary remote as humans and flies. The law is exact, instantaneous, reversible, stepwise, and allows for a rapid (within less than two...

Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the same for an entire species, i.e., it is independent of the population, its phenotypes, environment and history. The law implies that the survivability changes with environment via phase transitions, which are simultaneous for all generatio...

Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies. Demographic data for humans has been interpreted as showing existence of a limit, or even as an indication of a decreasing limit, but also as evidence that a limit does not exist. This paper studies what can be inferred from data about human mo...

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...

Significant fraction (about 98.5% in humans, 24% in microbe Rickettsia prowazekii) of most animal genomes is non-coding DNA. Although recent studies established functions of its certain portions, it remains genomic dark matter. The paper unravels its unusual nature with time reversal approach. Any genome emerged in evolutionary selection of the fittest survivors. Survivability of modern species is extensively quantified. Accurate analysis establishes that under specified cond...

Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and evolutionary history) laws, which are inconsistent with known physics and unique for self-organized live systems. The laws predict two and only two universal ways of biological diversity and evolution; their singularities; a new ki...

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...