ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2012
Human actuarial aging increases faster when background death rates are lower: a consequence of differential heterogeneity?
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Strehler-Mildvan mortality correlation arises from changes in the variability of ageing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Aging dynamics in captive sea turtles reflect conserved life-history patterns across the testudine phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Compensation Effect of Mortality: A Global Analysis of Human Populations.Ageing and longevity research · 2025Article
- The Strehler-Mildvan correlation as a valuable tool for monitoring the long-term health status of a population.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Trends in Human Species-Specific Lifespan and Actuarial Aging Rate.Biochemistry. Biokhimiia · 2022Article
- Linking the maximum reported life span to the aging rate in wild birds.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Senescent cells and the incidence of age-related diseases.Aging cell · 2021Article
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- Family member deaths across adulthood predict Alzheimer's disease risk: The Cache County Study.International journal of geriatric psychiatry · 2016Article
- Quantifying the shape of aging.PloS one · 2015Article
- An age-period-cohort analysis of cancer incidence among the oldest old, Utah 1973-2002.Population studies · 2015Article
- Survival of offspring who experience early parental death: early life conditions and later-life mortality.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2014Article
- An examination of black/white differences in the rate of age-related mortality increase.Demographic research · 2013Article
- Early origins of longevity: prenatal exposures to food shortage among early Utah pioneers.Journal of developmental origins of health and disease · 2013Article
- Trends in scale and shape of survival curves.Scientific reports · 2012Article
- The reproductive advantages of a long life: longevity and senescence in wild female African elephants.Behavioral ecology and sociobiologyArticle
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Abstract
Many analyses of human populations have found that age-specific mortality rates increase faster across most of adulthood when overall mortality levels decline. This contradicts the relationship often expected from Williams' classic hypothesis about the effects of natural selection on the evolution of senescence. More likely, much of the within-species difference in actuarial aging is not due to variation in senescence, but to the strength of filters on the heterogeneity of frailty in older survivors. A challenge to this differential frailty hypothesis was recently posed by an analysis of life tables from historical European populations and traditional societies that reported variation in actuarial aging consistent with Williams' hypothesis after all. To investigate the challenge, we reconsidered those cases and aging measures. Here we show that the discrepancy depends on Ricklefs' aging rate measure, ω, which decreases as mortality levels drop because it is an index of mortality level itself, not the rate of increase in mortality with age. We also show unappreciated correspondence among the parameters of Gompertz-Makeham and Weibull survival models. Finally, we compare the relationships among mortality parameters of the traditional societies and the historical series, providing further suggestive evidence that differential heterogeneity has strong effects on actuarial aging.
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