Category Archives: Forces of Natural Selection

Rose offers the scientific context/framework for Ancestral Health

Science is a mess today as is medicine. Every day we hear a new this or that. Many hold very strong beliefs based on what? What was missing was a context for health. This is what Michael has offered us. … Continue reading

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Ancestry Foundation – A great centre of information – Videos from the conference

Earlier this month, the Ancestry Foundation hosted the first of what will be many conferences on Health as seen through the perspective of Evolution. Here is the link to the many excellent videos Here is the link to the slides and here … Continue reading

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So when will you lose your health – Part 2 – When you live in the wrong environment

You get ill when you look like this – this is how I looked aged 59 – I weighed 205 lbs. How I look here has all the signs that you have not lived your life according to the rules. … Continue reading

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The Great Return – Part 5 – Why Food is the way home

I have been trying to see how #Paleo is more than a diet. Taking control of our health will in the end be about changing how we live. For our system today not only restricts our diet to shit but … Continue reading

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Diet – Where your ancestral heritage is important

Surely we must have adapted to agriculture by now? The answer is no and sort of yes to that question. It depends on what your ancestral heritage is or how long you have been exposed to agriculture. Let’s take dairy. … Continue reading

Posted in Ancestry, Constraints, Context, Diet, Environments, Evolutionary Novelty, Forces of Natural Selection, Physiology, Population, The Science, Theses | 12 Comments

Are you at risk of getting ill? Yes when we get older

My son who is 31 likes what he sees in how I have changed but is having trouble with giving up modern foods for himself. Especially beer! I told him that, as a Scot – he is a Celt and … Continue reading

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Michael’s Recent Interview

Michael is interviewed by Jimmie Moore on how Evolution plays such a role and also on how diet is so important. Here MR summarizes the key factors of the 55 in a few minutes.  

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The “Plateau” – Thesis #30 in action

Here is a short video of Ruth – soon to be 100. My real point of posting her video is to remind us all that there is a plateau waiting for us as we get older. If we are not … Continue reading

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Thesis 21

Thesis #21 – Multiple pharmaceutical substances or nutritional supplements will only ameliorate aging to the extent that they achieve genome-wide tuning similar to that which natural selection achieves when its forces are strengthened at later ages. So how best to … Continue reading

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Thesis 24

Thesis #24 – Altering all cell-molecular regulatory signaling during the aging phase will provide at most partial amelioration for the problem of declining adaptation, because dysfunctional signaling will also arise at organ and systemic levels as a result of the … Continue reading

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Thesis 27

Thesis #27 – Among populations which have had their forces of natural selection strengthened experimentally, detectable improvements in adult survival and reproduction have been observably achieved within dozens of generations. So there I am, in 1977, realizing that all evolution … Continue reading

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Thesis 28

Thesis #28 – Among such experimental populations evolving greater levels of adaptation at later adult ages, evolutionary changes in (a) structural gene frequency, (b) gene regulation, (c) patterns of cumulative damage, and (d) still other features of physiological function will … Continue reading

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Thesis 29

Thesis #29 – Species with fully symmetrical fission as the sole means of reproduction do not have a declining force of natural selection acting on survival, and they do not evolve aging phases in which all individuals show declining survival. … Continue reading

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Thesis 30

Thesis #30 – The forces of natural selection plateau at zero values at very late adult ages, and do not decline further for all subsequent ages. This is the most important thing of all, even if no one understood what … Continue reading

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Thesis 31

Thesis #31 – After the forces of natural selection plateau, it is possible for survival and reproduction to plateau at positive values due to age-independent beneficial effects of some genetic variants. As with modern physics, again, it is often difficult … Continue reading

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Thesis 32

Thesis #32 – Before the forces of natural selection plateau, it is possible for genetic drift, due to small population sizes among other possibilities, to weaken the ability of natural selection to distinguish among genetic variants affecting later adult life, … Continue reading

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Thesis 33

Thesis #33 – When late-adult plateaus in survival and reproduction occur, members of biological cohorts that reach such plateaus will show stabilization of some but not necessarily all functional characters. Evolutionary theory makes a simple prediction about how the key … Continue reading

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Thesis 34

Thesis #35 – Severe antagonistic pleiotropy can cause the evolution of zero late-adult survival probability even under ideal conditions, when genetic trade-offs between early reproduction and subsequent adult survival are sufficiently strong. Not all organisms have three phases to their … Continue reading

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Thesis 35

Thesis #35 – The ages at which the forces of natural selection plateau depend on the last ages of reproduction and survival in the evolutionary history of a population, allowing experimental evolution of the cessation of aging by deliberately changing … Continue reading

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Thesis 36

Thesis #36 – Experimental populations which have evolved different time-points for the cessation of aging can be used to uncover the biological foundations that determine the timing of the cessation of aging. During the 1980s and 1990s, my laboratory devoted … Continue reading

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Thesis 37

Thesis #37 – Patterns of aging, including the rates of decline of functional characters and the timing of any cessation in such decline, depend on the environments in which cohorts are raised and live as adults. (Picture of Einstein talking … Continue reading

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Thesis 39

Thesis #39 –  Patterns of adaptation are jointly determined by long-antecedent evolutionary patterns of natural selection, mutation, and inbreeding, as well as the immediate impact of environmental manipulation. In studying the aging phase and other patterns of adaptation in an … Continue reading

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Thesis 40

Thesis #40 – Experimental strategies for the study of aging that involve the introduction of novel mutations or increased levels of inbreeding will systematically impair the scientific study of aging, as they degrade and disrupt adaptation generally. At this point, … Continue reading

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Thesis 41

Thesis #41 – Experimental strategies for the study of aging that involve the use of environments that are evolutionarily novel will systematically impair the scientific study of aging, as natural selection will not have previously fostered adaptation to such novel … Continue reading

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Thesis 42

Thesis #42 – As a pattern of age-dependent adaptation, aging and the post-aging period are best studied using the range of methods used to study adaptation by evolutionary biologists, such as the comparative method, experimental evolution, and genomics. By this … Continue reading

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Thesis 43

Thesis #43 – Experimental manipulation of the forces of natural selection is one of the most powerful methods of studying the biological foundations of aging, because it can direct experimental evolution to produce extensive genetic differentiation with respect to both … Continue reading

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Thesis 44

Thesis #44 – Most of our ancestral hominin populations of the last million years benefited from increased forces of natural selection at early adult ages under conditions of relatively abundant nutrition derived from hunting, gathering, and cooking and an increased … Continue reading

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Thesis 45

Thesis #45 – Our ancestral hunter-gatherer populations had generally low population densities, and thus low effective population sizes, which produced relatively early cessation of aging at relatively high function due to genetic drift. With very low population densities among our … Continue reading

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Thesis 46

Thesis #46 – In the last ten to twenty thousand years, some human populations adopted extensive agricultural cultivation of grass species and the use of milk from other mammals for nutrition, a novel environment which changed the action of natural … Continue reading

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Thesis 47

Thesis #47 – This novel agricultural lifestyle initially depressed adaptation and health, leading to intense natural selection for adaptations to the digestion of foods derived from grasses and milk, which has since produced adaptation to agricultural conditions at early ages. … Continue reading

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