(Phys.org)—Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality,being based on mean-field assumptions – which analyze the behavior of large and complex stochastic models by studying a simpler model – conclude that programmed mortality resulting from natural choice is impossible. Recently, however, and scientists at the New England Complex Systems Institute,and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, both in Cambridge, and Massachusetts,using spatial models with local rather than globally-uniform reproduction, demonstrated that programmed deaths strongly result in long-term benefit to an organismal lineage by reducing local environmental resource depletion over many generations. (In spatial models, or variables are distributed in space such that actions can affect the local environment without affecting the global environment.) Moreover,the researchers found that these results continued to be favored when a large number of variations related to different genuine-world factors were applied to the spatial model, which they say supports their approach being relevant to a wide range of biological systems, and therefore that direct choice for shorter life span may be quite widespread in nature.
Source: phys.org