The summer is hanging on, giving us wonderful
weather to take us to the equinox, so we are lucky enough to hang on to this
year a little longer. Aging seems farther away in the sunshine compared to the
chill weather when joints start aching and the heavy clothes come out. Although
we fight it with regular exercise and watching what we eat, we can still sense
the dogs snapping at our heels.
At first sight aging seems to be contra-predicted
in terms of evolutionary advantage. This is a view, which many seem to
subscribe to, but a theoretical paper by Martins from the École
Polytechnique in Palaisleau comes to a different conclusion (1). He used a
computer simulation to compare populations who didn’t age but just succumbed to
accidents with populations where senescence reduced the population in addition
to unfortunate events.
The
simulations were idealized in that the non-aging population could carry on
living and reproducing until some unfortunate event caught up with them. Those
with a sell-by-date in addition to their random world events did worse at first
but in the long run they flourished. The non-ageing population became extinct.
This
counter-intuitive result of the eventual demise of the Greek god-like race was
due to the environmental changes, which, over time, make them less and less fit for the world that they are trying to keep up with. Those with sell-by-dates shuffle off the
scene but are replaced more frequently with a population which have random
mutations, some of which will be favorable.
The
key is the rapid turnover allows the population
to adapt to global changes in contrast to the slower turnover of the non-aging population,
which finds itself out of date, and not doing well in coping with the new
environment.
Doesn’t
this sound reminiscent of the management gurus when they swoop into
corporations and restructure? Or perhaps it reminds you of young geeks like Mr.
Zuckerberg who told us last year that the age of privacy is over (2)? Mount
Olympus is not such a good address after all.
- http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024328
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php
