MSc Student
Advisor: Philipp Mitteröcker

Unit for Theoretical Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology
University of Vienna

Abstract

Senescence can be found widely across the tree of life, however, the life expectancies as well as the rate of senescence show a great diversity. There are many theories that try to explain these differences and how senescence came about in the first place, but there is still no agreement. For my master’s project, I am using population simulations to see whether senescence could have evolved by increasing the evolvability of the population. By increasing the death rate, as long as this does not come at a cost for reproduction, the turnover in the population is increased too, allowing more phenotypes to be “tried out” by evolution and thus accelerating adaptation. The age at death then decreases, because it becomes statistically coupled to the traits that are being selected for.