This is Michael Rose. Michael is the leading scientist in the field of Aging.
In 1987, Rose returned to the United States to become an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. In 1990, Rose was promoted to Professor. In 1991, his Evolutionary Biology of Aging appeared, a book that ranged from mathematical genetics to cell biology. This work offered a view of aging that was a complete departure from the views that had dominated the aging field since 1960. The journal Evolution described the field of gerontology as having become “after Rose”. In 1997, Rose received the Busse Prize of the World Congress of Gerontology. In 1998, his book Darwin’s Spectre was published, a popular introduction to the history and significance of evolutionary biology. In 2004, a compendium of his laboratories’ research findings was published as Methuselah Flies. His latest books are Experimental Evolution (with T. Garland) and Does Aging Stop? (with L.D. Mueller and C.L. Rauser).
This blog is a record of a conversation that I will have with Michael about his 55 Theses.
At the heart of the challenge of the 55 theses is this idea – That most of our health is not dependent on the health institutions but on evolved biology. If we fit our lives closely to our evolutionary design, then we will age well.
Such an insight transforms our world. It puts control of our health back into our own hands. It means a shift away from mechanistic intervention to a holistic perspective of health. A holistic view based not on conjecture and hope but one based on the rules of nature.
These theses challenge our society the same way as Luther’s did and have the potential to have the same transformative impact on human society.
This is me – your host and curator – Robert Paterson. My role is to ask Michael the kind of questions that I hope you would like to ask. I am not a scientist but have spent much of my life trying to tell their story or in apply it to the work place.
Michael Rose's 55 
I am surprised to see how evolutionary biology can provide such an interesting perspective to all areas of biology, especially to matters pertaining to the human condition. I hope that Michael Rose’s 55 Theses will revolutionize the way the biological sciences are viewed and taught throughout academic communities.
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Would the fact that as we age and our biology comes to prefer a pre-agricultural diet explain why gluten intolerance shows itself more in older people?
Good question – many who are of an ancestry that have a longer exposure to wheat are OK with wheat and so gluten until their 30’s maybe 40’s. But then we lose this and revert more to type. You will evidence of this reversion in many people not just about gluten. We are fine and then a switch seems to go on.
There is another factor – modern whet strains are very different today from those used 30 years ago with much more gluten – this too may be a factor
I don’t think so, because, grain today is produced very differently than just a few decades ago.
Firstly, the grain is ‘polluted’ during every stage of the growing and harvesting process, and, secondly, in the milling process it is ‘smashed’ to the point where the nutrients that make up the fabric of the grain are separated, therefore, in a word, it is non-digestible.
Thanks. Wouldn’t humans eventually adapt to their modern diets though, even to such things as processed sugars and trans-fats? I realise that if Rose’s ideas are sound, and they seem to be, acting on them is in our benefit, but wouldn’t we be “holding up” evolution?
Maybe – it took a million years to adapt to eating a lot of meat – is it worth it to be so ill today?
I don’t understand the process that allows an individual to thrive on an agricultural diet for the first, say 40 years, and then stops working thereafter. I can guess why that might be the case but is there an in-depth explanation of the hypothesis here? I was not able to locate such as post.
I will send your comment to Michael
This is indeed hard to understand. The key is to realize that there is no aging process, as a specific piece of physiology. There is only age-dependent de-tuning of adaptation. And adaptation can do anything evolution makes it do, even make females systematically live longer than males because the females are the gender that the mitochondria adapt to favor. Evolutionary biology is nothing like the simple-minded adaptationist syllogisms offered in the pop science press, or the writings of Richard Dawkins. It is more like modern-day physics in its underlying paradoxes and mathematical complexity, to say nothing of its experimental challenges. Sorry, but the counter-intuitive nature of this issue is inherent.
Is your theory related to the disposable soma theory, or am I getting something wrong here?
The disposable soma theory is a special case of antagonistic pleiotropy.