Genes That Boost Fertility Also Shorten Our Life, Study Suggests
Why do we grow old and die? In the 19th century, German biologist August Weismann argued that the machinery of life inevitably wore out with time. Death had evolved “for the need of the species,” he declared. It cleared away weak, old individuals so they wouldn’t compete with young ones. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times That explanation never made sense to George Williams, an American evolutionary biologist. Natural selection acts only on the genes that are passed down