The paper George Williams published in 1957 about senescence has inspired much of the field of evolutionary medicine. I never heard about it in medical school, but the evolutionary biologists I was talking with at the University of Michigan in the 1980’s said I should get a copy. Reading it changed my life. If aging has an evolutionary explanation, what about everything else in medicine? I spent a summer in the library finding and analyzing data on survival curves for animals in the wild. They showed that senescence greatly decreases fitness for many species in the wild, contradicting the the mutation accumulation theory, and supporting Williams’ idea of antagonistic pleiotropy. That led to publications and a wonderful collaboration with George for the next two decades.
Now 60 years after its publication, Williams’ article remains fresh. In a new article in Evolution, Laillard and Lemaître offer a review of the paper, and the status of the hypotheses it proposed. I hope it inspires many people to read the original paper that inspired much of the progress in evolutionary medicine.
Gaillard, J.-M., & Lemaître, J.-F. (2017). The Williams’ legacy: A critical reappraisal of his nine predictions about the evolution of senescence. Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13379
Abstract: Williams’ evolutionary theory of senescence based on antagonistic pleiotropy has become a landmark in evolutionary biology, and more recently in biogerontology and evolutionary medicine. In his original article, Williams launched a set of nine “testable deductions” from his theory. Although some of these predictions have been repeatedly discussed, most have been overlooked and no systematic evaluation of the whole set of Williams’ original predictions has been performed. For the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the Williams’ article, we provide an updated evaluation of all these predictions. We present the pros and cons of each prediction based on recent accumulation of both theoretical and empirical studies performed in the laboratory and in the wild. From our viewpoint, six predictions are mostly supported by our current knowledge at least under some conditions (although Williams’ theory cannot thoroughly explain why for some of them). Three predictions, all involving the timing of senescence, are not supported. Our critical review of Williams’ predictions highlights the importance of William’s contribution and clearly demonstrates that, 60 years after its publication, his article does not show any sign of senescence.
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From time to time George Williams visited Queen’s University at Kingston and we once had a long chat. It is good to see his work still receiving attention. However, the notion that his key idea on aging dates back to Medawar and Fisher can be challenged. Like so much in modern evolutionary biology, the idea had been anticipated by Samuel Butler, beginning in 1878 with his first evolution book – “Life and Habit”. The idea was quite explicit in his later “Humour of Homer and Other Essays”:
“If heredity and memory are essentially the same [today read DNA], we should expect no animal would develop new structures of importance after the age at which its species begins ordinarily to continue its race [today read when it stops producing offspring]; for we cannot suppose offspring to remember anything that happens to the parent subsequent to the parent’s ceasing to contain the offspring within itself [today read the gamete that produced that offspring]. From the average age, therefore, of reproduction [termination], offspring should cease to have any further steady, continuous memory [today read DNA information] to fall back upon; what memory there is should be full of faults, and as such unreliable.”