{"id":436,"date":"2015-10-19T16:27:55","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T16:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshmitteldorf.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=436"},"modified":"2015-10-19T22:49:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T22:49:05","slug":"from-roscoff-with-rotifers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2015\/10\/19\/from-roscoff-with-rotifers\/","title":{"rendered":"From Roscoff, with Rotifers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roscoff is a picture-perfect coastal town in Brittany. \u00a0I have just returned from the first <\/span>Monod Conference on the Comparative Biology of Aging<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Looking<\/a>
Looking toward shore from the quay. My hotel is in the middle, just right of the cathedral.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The conference was opened by a theoretical lecture by Tom Kirkwood, father of the popular <\/span>disposable soma theory<\/span><\/a> of aging. \u00a0He admonished us that evolution is a mathematical science that yields specific and quantitative information about what aging can and cannot be. \u00a0These provide a powerful mathematical underpinning for the understanding of aging.<\/span><\/p>\n

The next morning, Annette Baudisch told us that in reality, nature has produced every combination of aging strategy that you can imagine, and some that you probably never imagined. \u00a0The kind of aging that humans know is gradual and accelerating, leading to death on a timetable that is predictable within about 10-15%. \u00a0But this brand of aging is a small minority in nature. \u00a0There are salmon and octopuses and annual plants that reproduce in a burst and then die suddenly. \u00a0There are beetles and jellyfish that are able to \u201cage backward\u201d, reverting to a larval state under stress, then beginning life again with a fresh start. \u00a0Baudisch coined the term \u201c<\/span>negative senescence<\/span><\/a>\u201d for a phenomenon that is not the same thing as this: \u00a0most trees and some turtles and lobsters just grow ever larger and more fertile over decades or even centuries. \u00a0There are giant lobsters that grow to 40 pounds, and there are clams you can hold in the palm of your hand that have over 500 annual growth rings. \u00a0Each of these animals and plants grows progressively less likely to die with each passing year, year after year–hence \u201cnegative senescence\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n

Charming and perfectly diplomatic, Baudisch overtly praises Kirkwood and the contributions he has made to the evolutionary science of aging; but in truth, she has produced more counter-examples to Kirkwood’s pronouncements than all of us combined.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was less diplomatic, and in my presentation, I ranted about the many blatant contridictions to Kirkwood’s \u201cprecise, mathematical theory\u201d, and in big red Powerpoint letters counseled the assembled scientists, \u201c<\/span>Don’t let the mathematicians tell you how to interpret your data<\/em>.<\/b>\u201d \u00a0The mathematical theory for evolution of aging is based on an early 20<\/span>th<\/span> Century paradigm of R. A. Fisher, in which gene frequency changes gradually while the population level and the ecology remain ever stable. \u00a0We now know that <\/span>ecologies change hand-in-hand with gene frequencies<\/span><\/a>, on the same time scale. \u00a0Furthermore, there are a dozen mechanisms of evolution that were unknown to Fisher, of which the simplistic equations of classical evolutionary theory takes no account:<\/span><\/p>\n