The NY Times reported today (Why We Die, Why We Live) on a new theory from Dr. Ronald Lee, a demographer at the University of California at Berkeley, which was published in today’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Note up front that this is more of a theorectical framework, not an analysis of genetic data, and there are no immediate practical uses of his work.
Still this seems very interesting. In the classic theory that has prevailed up to now, age (lifespan, that is) was seen as very dependent on the reproductive cycle of a species but this had several wholes big enough to drive a truck through. Key among them was why childhood mortality tends to occur significantly more in the first couple of years of life and is not spread evenly throughout. Lee’s insight depends on economics to show that mutations that cause later in childhood death waste the huge investment made in raising the child and therefore are quickly selected against via evolutionary pressures.
BillSaysThis 