Talk:Evolution of ageing

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 January 2020 and 27 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Akziq.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:58, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2019 and 24 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Cdean2017.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:00, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Graph
This paper http://www.ucihs.uci.edu/biochem/steele/PDFs/Hydra_senescence_paper.pdf has a graph showing age of first reproduction vs lifetime that we might want to reproduce in some way. — Omegatron 22:46, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Spelling?
Is the British English spelling "ageing?" The correct American spelling is "aging." 128.101.207.39 08:55, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes. Richard001 00:09, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

The first sentence in the article uses the American spelling. Should that be changed to the British version if that's the way the title is going to be? How are we supposed to keep this consistent? This is a common problem I've noticed on Wikipedia... damn two different types of English speakers. Quixoto 19:01, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I went through the whole thing and changed all spellings to ageing some months ago, but the journal articles still mainly use 'aging' since they're mostly American, and I don't want to change the title of the articles just because of spelling differences. The spelling you're talking about here was just an anon 'correcting' the spelling, albeit to make it inconsistent with the article title. I've left a message about our policies on different spelling systems on their talk page. If anyone else changes the spelling just revert it and do the same. Richard001 00:09, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I changed all occurrences of "aging" back to "ageing" (since the title of the article contains "ageing") except for the occurrences that occurred within titles in the references, since it's Wikipedia's policy not to change spellings in titles and quotations if I understood it correctly. ::Travis Evans 11:07, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Why originally go to the trouble of changing to match the title when it's clear from all of the earliest edits that the spelling was "Aging" and someone moved the article to "Ageing" without discussion or comment?Zebulin (talk) 05:59, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
 * There are more than two variants of English spelling. :-)  Here's the way we handle it: Manual_of_Style — Omegatron 00:30, 11 May 2007 (UTC)


 * This article should properly use the "Aging" spelling. I don't care personally, but the first major contributor used the American spelling, and half a year later, Richard001 went through and changed all the spellings to the British version. (Huge no-no there, Richard).  If anyone changes it back to the American spelling, they are in the right.  Just FYI.  In fact, maybe I'll do it later.  For consistency. Maxvip (talk) 20:22, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Examining the article history, WP:ENGVAR does not seem to support changing to American spelling:
 * Though the article was originally written using American English, the creator wrote it at Evolution of ageing where it has remained ever since . They also later made a redirect from Evolution of aging to here rather than moving the article to the American spelling. This ambivalence does not exactly establish a clear precedent.
 * While I agree that it probably would have been more appropriate for Richard001 to move the article to Evolution of aging while editing it in February 2007, he has resolved the title–article inconsistency and, most importantly, as it has evolved, the article has remained stably in British English.
 * Some standardized rigour (talk) 07:02, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

problem?
The fact that this paper is written in first person does not make sense to me. This is supposed to be an unbias compilation of information. This article is written with the author's opinions in mind. Also, the programmed theory of aging section needs citations and updated information. This information can be found at http://www.programmed-aging.org/. Next, the way the section on replicative senescence is contradicting. The way it is worded needs to be changed to highlight that most cells cannot divide infinitely.

Slingluff.5 (talk) 13:15, 1 October 2014 (UTC)slingluff.5

It says "almost" all things.. If I am not mistaken, ALL things DO die. Not "almost all." Anyone else agree?
 * They will eventually, but with the simpler organisms you don't see senescence like you do with say a mammal. Spores can even tolerate extreme conditions. It doesn't mean that they are invincible, but they don't die in an inevitable way either. Richard001 01:53, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Some simple organisms will at times replicate through cloning. For some, it is hard to say where one organism ends and another begins.  Examples are Basal shoot, Aspen, Stolon, or Mycelium.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.206.185.177 (talk) 19:18, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Links
The Medaawar reference 3 has been hacked and the link goes to a bogus aging site. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.142.46.78 (talk) 15:15, 25 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I removed the URL section of the reference. Frivolous Consultant (talk) 05:12, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

I don't believe the article " The evolutionary Biology of Aging" is written by Alex Comfort. If you follow the link it appears that the quote at the top of the page is written by him but, the article is presumably written by the web site owner João Pedro de Magalhães. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.140.46 (talk) 21:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

The explanation that aging/dying cannot be evolutionarily advantageous is obviously incorrect. You do have to feed every member of a community for them survive. If no one ever died, and kept reproducing (as the author suggests), then the population would be uncontrollable. So, it is advantageous if people eventually die. And, it is advantageous if unfit individuals produce fewer offspring.

Wording
I made this edit to try and improve the wording. The previous wording used terms like purpose and design in an evolutionary context but these words although not uncomming, are best avoided particularly in an encylopaedia intended for the layperson as they are confusing and can easily lead or contribute to misconceptions about evolution and teleological thinking. Traits may arise because they confer an evolutionary advantage but there is no evolutionary purpose and evolution doesn't really 'design' Nil Einne (talk) 19:55, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Interesting article; I believe there is enough discussion and citation of theories to show that the article is not OR, but some of he writing is unencyclopedic and POV. Changing the OR tag to Cleanup tag, redating it May 2008. I'll also find a way to link the article from Immortality, as it looks highly relevant to the issue. —Yamara ✉  01:09, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm tagging a section as having weasel words, though I will leave it to editors more familiar with the material to do the rewriting.


 * I agree about the weasel words. Both of these ‘problems’ are related to the control of the cell cycle and cell division. As far as I am aware, there are no wholly (obligative) single-celled organisms with programmed cell death. Multi-cellular organisms use apoptosis during growth and development to reshape tissues and some, like humans, also use it regenerate tissues. Uncontrolled cell division creates tumours and when this causes disruption between tissue types, cancer occurs {Greaves, 2000, “Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy”}. To create a complex 3-dimensional bauplan cell division must be very tightly controlled. This idea is supported by the fact that most adult body cells lack the ability to divide indefinitely, as such a trait would make the occurrence of cancer much more likely. The other arguments are weakly thought out group-selection. The reason why this and most group selection arguments fail is because they are not evolutionary stable strategies and are open to invasion by non-cooperating strategists. In this case, the author has failed to take into account the changing dynamic of the population as genes (and their respective phenotypes/strategies) change in frequency. Assuming the environment has a limited amount of resources, an immortal but slow reproducing individual will be out-competed by the numerical superiority of an individual reproducing only fractionally faster AND its descendants. I believe that genuine problems are covered already higher up in the article and that the whole section following 'Problems..' is pointless. GinReaper (talk) 13:10, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Theories, hypotheses and evolutionary hypotheses
Two things occur to me. The first is the use of the word theory to describe a hypothesis. I'm not sure that any of the ideas competing to explain senescence can accurately be termed theories. Would it not be more correct to say that they are hypotheses?

Second, I have a problem with the sentence "The problem with such theories is the same one that troubled Weismann: a good evolutionary theory should be about mechanisms, not purposes.". This is not true. Evolution is entirely about purpose, although an understanding of potential mechanisms is integral to a good evolutionary hypothesis. I'm not sure what is meant by this sentence, since the problem is really how you reconcile adoptosis with individual-based selection, regardless of mechanisms. Ianrickard (talk)


 * I disagree here. Richard Dawkins famously likened the process of evolution to that of a 'blind watchmaker'. It has no purpose, there is no end-goal in mind, it is just a series of cumulative small changes which can be viewed as an overall mechanism of development. I agree with the article that evolution has nothing to do with purpose, it is entirely the mechanism of how features evolve that should interest us, as taking any two points in evolutionary history and claiming natural selection purposefully made certain changes is a fallacy. Jebus989 (talk) 13:38, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

When arguing against replicative senescence it is said that "Many invertebrates experience replicative senescence, though they never die of cancer." It is not correct, as shown by http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/10/7/403.full.pdf (1950) http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.en.13.010168.001111 (1968) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/200/4349/1448.short (1978) http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es0400887 (2005) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19218489 (2009) The argument has to be rephrased. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pspsilveira (talk • contribs) 14:18, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Ecological and Population Dynamics Implications of Senescence in a Species?
Aren't there any references that discuss the role that population dynamics and ecology play on determining whether, how and much senescence occurs in a species? Some of this is obvious enough that there should be some references somewhere on it. If the extrinsic mortality rate does not match the natural birth rate, then you'll either have an exponential blowup or decay in its population, which is not sustainable. If the birth rate matches the extrinsic mortality rate of a species with little or no senescence, so that the average time between generations is potentially large, the species exhibits a lower rate of generation-to-generation adaptation as a whole to natural selection. They would have been filtered out by competitor species that have quicker generational turnovers (and correspondingly: higher birth-rates and thus higher matching death-rates ... something that senescence may contribute to regulating the equilibrium between). So, there should also be some references out there that link this good-for-individual versus bad-for-species trade-off with the Prisoner's Dilemma. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A000:1401:86C9:222:69FF:FE4C:408B (talk) 08:43, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

talk about flies
do you like flies —Preceding unsigned comment added by Neal 1234321 (talk • contribs) 16:57, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Layman fallacies
Someone made these contributions:

The body's inflammation process exists to fight disease; but the system can turn against us, and does so increasingly with older age, causing heart disease and arthritis. This happens reliably enough that a low dose of aspirin each day (slightly toning down the inflammatory response in general) is sufficient to measurably reduce incidence of disease and death in older people. Is inflammation a function that goes haywire after a certain age? Or is self-destruction an adaptation?

First off this should have been a keen google search for knowledge rather than dumped into wikipedia in a self-satisfied manner.

(Fallacies: The eye of the beholder in this case is one embedded in modern human society, with recent human knowledge leading to such population numbers within the past centuries - having little effect on biological evolution. No academic resources, paper - nothing of value for students etc.., layman thinking, lack of understanding of the mammalian immune system and its premise, thus also of its evolutionary context. Don't take it personally.)

Shortening of telomeres is a mechanism implicated in the ageing process. For replicative senescence in one-celled organisms, telomeric ageing is clearly a 'feature' of the genetic software, not a bug. If ageing could evolve in one-celled organisms for the long-term good of the species, and despite its cost to the individual, then why not other forms of ageing that affect higher animals?

->layman, fallacies all over, terminology, prejudice. Please don't contribute, for "the long-term good of the species". Neither do I other than fixing spellings, and cleaning up, for there are much more educated contributors - which we as students benefit from usable and valuable articles. wikipedia is for ALL. it has to meet demands of those who want a simple introduction and those who want usable, valuable, accurate knowledge. make a children wikipedia if you want. Thanks.Slicky (talk) 07:09, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

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Traceychung (talk) 16:51, 25 January 2018 (UTC)== Article Evaluation ==

Aging decreases the fitness of an individual. Gene expression causes activation of genes at specific times in normal growth and development of an organism and problems in genes causes problems to arise. Senescence causes animals to lose speed and may die from predator attack, without old age. Antagonistic pleiotropy causes beneficial effects in one gene and detrimental effects in another. Some aging genes enhance fertility early in an individual's like. Genetic trade off is the main cause of aging.

Hello, My name is Casey and I am choosing this article to work on for my Developmental Biology course for the Spring of 2019. Cdean2017 (talk) 03:55, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Organization and Overall Concerns
Going through the entire article, I have come across several concerns. The first concern is that the complete organization of the article is a mess. At the beginning, the theories and history are separated out by different events or people. Then, towards the end it begins to group some together. They should either be grouped by type of theory or individualized throughout the entire article. Not to mention, there are several sections of the article that are completely irrelevant and are opinion-based. This includes: History, Problems with the classical ageing theories, programmed ageing theories, and biogerontology.

The second concern is the lack of resources and citations. There are several paragraphs that talk about specific information, but are not cited. This includes: mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy, and problems with the classical ageing theories. The third concern is that a lot of sections are wordy and would be hard to read for someone is not an expert in science or an upper level student. This would include the introduction paragraph and mutation accumulation.

I would like to make edits to the overall structure and rework the sections that are currently present in the article. If you have any suggestions please let me know. I will begin this process later in the week. Cdean2017 (talk) 15:03, 12 February 2019 (UTC)cdean2017

Mutation accumulation experiments
I just accepted Mutation accumulation experiments from draftspace. Possibly it should be linked to from this article? I'll leave that to the SMEs to decide. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:48, 17 April 2020 (UTC)