ABSTRACT
The first five chapters of this volume make a case that natural selection has included a death program in the genomes of most animals and plants. I judge that evidence to be compelling and indisputable. But the ideas in the present chapter about how that happened are more speculative. Neo-Darwinian theory about how natural selection operates will have to stretch to accommodate any aging program and the evolutionary processes described in this chapter are perhaps the most conservative, requiring the minimal extension of neo-Darwinism. All depends on the evolution of ecosystem stability, as described in Chapter 6. The need for homeostasis is easy to understand and when ecosystems are unstable, they are punished with swift extinction. This provides a plausible mechanism and a basis for understanding the evolution of aging.
