Journal article
The long lives of primates and the ‘invariant rate of ageing’ hypothesis
- Abstract:
- Is it possible to slow the rate of ageing, or do biological constraints limit its plasticity? We test the ‘invariant rate of ageing’ hypothesis, which posits that the rate of ageing is relatively fixed within species, with a collection of 39 human and nonhuman primate datasets across seven genera. We first recapitulate, in nonhuman primates, the highly regular relationship between life expectancy and lifespan equality seen in humans. We next demonstrate that variation in the rate of ageing within genera is orders of magnitude smaller than variation in pre-adult and age-independent mortality. Finally, we demonstrate that changes in the rate of ageing, but not other mortality parameters, produce striking, species-atypical changes in mortality patterns. Our results support the invariant rate of ageing hypothesis, implying biological constraints on how much the human rate of ageing can be slowed.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 1.1MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-021-23894-3
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 3666
- Publication date:
- 2021-06-16
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-05-19
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1182274
- Local pid:
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pubs:1182274
- Deposit date:
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2021-06-16
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Colchero et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- ©2021 The Author(s).Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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