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WEEDING THE UNFIT. "Biological evolution, too, is anti-fragile. The death of unfit individuals is what causes a species to adapt and improve." https://lnkd.in/ddsS3VH View in LinkedIn

REJUVENATION. "Unlike the process of clonal senescence, where an entire population progressively declines in fitness, here the life potential of the lineage is continually renewed through young offspring cells (the process of rejuvenation) that are produced at the expense of aged parent cells." http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030045 View in LinkedIn

SYMMETRIC DIVISION. "We find that the old pole is a significant marker for multiple phenotypes associated with aging, namely, decreased metabolic efficiency (reduced growth rate), reduced offspring biomass production, and an increased chance of death. Thus, E. coli, an organism with a morphologically symmetrical division, no juvenile phase, and no identified separation between germ line and soma, is susceptible to aging." http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030045 View in LinkedIn

ASYMMETRIC DIVISION. "With the discovery of aging in single-celled organisms with no clear separation of these two constituents, it has been proposed that reproduction by asymmetric division is a prerequisite for aging and that organisms that reproduce without a distinction between parent and offspring do not age, thus exhibiting functional immortality." http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030045 View in LinkedIn

COLONY CONSTRAINTS. “One interesting prediction of the model is that selection generally favors cycles with group level properties when intermediate body size is associated with lowest mortality. That is, a universal requirement for the evolution of group cycles in the model is that the size-mortality curve be U-shaped. Furthermore, growth must decelerate with size.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580915000222 View in LinkedIn

FOOTNOTE. "There is evidence that even in "symmetric" cell division, one child cell may be slightly "younger" (less prone to death) than the other. Aging and death in an organism that reproduces by morphologically symmetric division." https://www.quora.com/Death-and-Dying-According-to-the-theory-of-evolution-why-do-we-die View in LinkedIn

TRANSITIONS TO COLONIES. “We develop a conceptual framework in which three fundamental processes (growth, division, and splitting) are the scaffold for unicellular and multicellular life cycles alike. We demonstrate how changes in the regulation of three fundamental aspects of colonial form (cell size, colony size, and colony cell number) could lead unicellular life cycles to evolve into primitive multicellular life cycles with group properties.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580915000222 View in LinkedIn

REBOOTING THE SYSTEM. "Complex organisms accumulate billions of errors and problems over their lifetime. Most of these errors are fixed as fast as they happen, but life takes a toll and not all problems are reversible. Just as reinstalling Microsoft Windows every so often fixes accumulated system issues, so does generating a new organism every so often from a single cell." https://www.quora.com/Death-and-Dying-According-to-the-theory-of-evolution-why-do-we-die View in LinkedIn

INDEFINITE REPAIR? "Even the increase of thermodynamic entropy can be counteracted indefinitely in an open system with a constant input of neguentropy. So there is no a priori reason why living systems would not be able to indefinitely maintain and repair their structural organization." http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/evolage.html View in LinkedIn

CLEAN SLATE VS MAINTENANCE. "The strategy that multicellular organisms such as humans use to project themselves into the future is to create new cell colonies from a single undifferentiated cell rather than maintaining existing colonies indefinitely. The main reason is that reproduction is more flexible and robust than maintenance, and it provides a way of starting over with a "clean slate" and slightly different genes." https://www.quora.com/Death-and-Dying-According-to-the-theory-of-evolution-why-do-we-die View in LinkedIn