Death happy: adaptive ageing and its evolution by kin selection in organisms with colonial ecology

Standard evolutionary theory, supported by mathematical modelling of outbred, dispersed populations predicts that ageing is not an adaptation. We recently argued that in clonal, viscous populations, programmed organismal death could promote fitness through social benefits and has, in some organisms...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences 2021-04, Vol.376 (1823), p.20190730-20190730
Main Authors: Galimov, Evgeniy R, Gems, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation, Biological
Aging
Animals
Biological Coevolution
Biological Evolution
Caenorhabditis elegans - physiology
Fishes - physiology
Life History Traits
Review
Selection, Genetic
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Summary:Standard evolutionary theory, supported by mathematical modelling of outbred, dispersed populations predicts that ageing is not an adaptation. We recently argued that in clonal, viscous populations, programmed organismal death could promote fitness through social benefits and has, in some organisms (e.g. ), evolved to shorten lifespan. Here, we review previous adaptive death theory, including consumer sacrifice, biomass sacrifice and defensive sacrifice types of altruistic adaptive death. In addition, we discuss possible adaptive death in certain semelparous fish, coevolution of reproductive and adaptive death, and adaptive reproductive senescence in . We also describe findings from recent tests for the existence of adaptive death in using computer modelling. Such models have provided new insights into how trade-offs between fitness at the individual and colony levels mean that senescent changes can be selected traits. Exploring further the relationship between adaptive death and social interactions, we consider examples where adaptive death results more from action of kin than from self-destructive mechanisms and, to describe this, introduce the term adaptive killing of kin. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ageing and sociality: why, when and how does sociality change ageing patterns?'
ISSN:0962-8436
1471-2970
DOI:10.1098/rstb.2019.0730