ABSTRACT
Diversity in a population offers powerful advantages, but these advantages accrue to the population as a whole and only over long time spans. It is not easy to understand how long-term advantages for the population can outweigh short-term disadvantages that accrue to the individual bearing these genes. The devastating rapidity of epidemics in a population that has grown too homogeneous suggest a process by which diversity may offer a powerful advantage that does not require thousands of generations. The Red Queen has been embraced by the theoretical community as an explanation for the evolution of sex because it gets them out of a great pickle. But the evolution of aging has not yet been recognized as a pickle. So the same selective mechanism is considered a leading hypothesis in the case of sex, but unnecessary baggage in the case of aging. Instead the three standard theories (of Chapter 4) are endlessly embroidered as each new experiment comes forward with data that doesn’t seem to fit.
