ABSTRACT
When George Williams suggested in 1957 that aging was a side-effect of fertility genes, it was a brilliant but abstract hypothesis, ahead of its time experimentally. The theory came from pure thought, but Williams made specific predictions from his theory. Of course, some of those “predictions” were actually gross observations about the phenomenology of aging, things that had been known to be true for a long time. For example, he “predicted” that animals that take longer to develop and mature should have longer lifespans. (This is true in general, but there are exceptions: remember the locust that spends 17 years maturing underground before living out its adult life in a few weeks.)
Williams also stuck his neck out to make some real predictions, some of which could not be tested for decades afterward:
1. Aging should be universal in higher organisms, absent in one-celled creatures and cloners.
