Nature Chronicles 1 July ·
This is Jonathan. This week he celebrated his 188th Birthday. (Born circa 1832). He has lived through both the World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and changing of 39 US presidents as well as seven British monarchs... Happy Birthday! ❤️🐢
Thanks Saeed. you have put your finger on the interesting point. In 2001 there was a series of lectures, the Reith Lectures, on BBC radio 4 called The end of age, by Prof Tom Kirkwood. He wrote a short book about it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2001/
Nicely put, the purpose of the hen is to get from one egg to the next! We should see the covid 19 genes as superb survivalists. The point about older breeders however, as I see it, is they represent a genotype which demonstrates its selective advantage over the period of its ontogeny; at the moment of mating that egg and sperm represent the fitness of their parents to survive the prevailing conditions up to that point in time--all the siblings of those parents have gone, eliminated, demonstrating their unfitness in the conditions over their life span. However, fitness at that moment is not a guarantee of fitness for life tomorrow.
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