Correlation between evolvability and susceptibility to ageing across species

Determine whether a direct correlation exists between a species’ evolvability and its susceptibility to ageing, and, if present, characterize the nature and strength of this relationship across species.

Background

Building on the proposal that ageing facilitates evolution by providing a lower-risk ‘buffer zone’ for testing innovations and smoothing the evolutionary fitness landscape, the authors suggest that more evolvable species might exhibit stronger or more prevalent ageing.

They propose comparative analyses across species to assess lifespans and evolutionary stability as a way to empirically test this predicted correlation, but the existence and form of the relationship remain to be established.