The Ins and Outs of Aging and Longevity*

As a nod to the oft-quoted evolutionary theorist George Williams, “It is remarkable that after a seemingly miraculous feat of morphogenesis, a complex metazoan should be unable to perform the much simpler task of merely maintaining what is already formed” (1). How and why we age are mysteries of the ages (2, 3). The “how” of this mystery is the purview of experimental biologists who try to understand the basic processes that lead to system maintenance failure—from the level of molecules to that of entire organisms—that we term “aging”. The “why” of this mystery is the purview of evolutionary theorists whose ideas shape the questions that biogerontologists pose, on the basis of the premise put forth by another preeminent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, that “[n]othing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (4). These experimental and evolutionary perspectives converge in the modern science of aging, and its curious cousin “longevity”, in an attempt to unify extensive findings from diverse areas of biology (5).