Aging is one of those subjects that many biologists feel is largely
unknown. Therefore, they often feel comfortable offering extremely
facile generalizations that are either unsupported or directly refuted
in the experimental literature. Despite this unfortunate precedent,
aging is a very broad phenomenon that calls out for integration beyond
the mere collecting together of results from disparate laboratory
organisms. With this in mind, Part One offers several different
synthetic perspectives. The editors, Rose and Finch, provide a verbal
synthesis of the field that deliberately attempts to look at aging from
both sides, the evolutionary and the molecular. The articles by
Charlesworth and Clark both provide population- genetic perspectives on
aging, the former more mathematical, the latter more experimental. Bell
takes a completely different approach, arguing that aging may not be the
result of evolutionary forces. Bell's model instead proposes that aging
could arise from the progressive deterioration of chronic host- pathogen
interactions. This is the first detailed publication of this model. It
marks something of a return to the type of aging theories that
predominated in the 1950's and 1960's, theories like the somatic
mutation and error catastrophe theories. We hope that the reader will be
interested by the contrast in views between the articles based on
evolutionary theory and that of Bell. MR. Rose and C. E. Finch (eds. ),
Genetics and Evolution of Aging, 5-12, 1994. (c) 1994 Kluwer Academic
Publishers. The J aniform genetics of aging 2 Michael R. Rosel & Caleb
E.
