Glenn Laboratories for the Biology of Aging, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5235, USA.
Annu Rev Physiol. 2013;75:617-9. doi: 10.1146/annurev-physiol-092712-103439.
As a nod to the oft-quoted evolutionary theorist George Williams, "It is remarkable that after a seemingly miraculous feat of morphogenesis, a complex metazoan should be unable to perform the much simpler task of merely maintaining what is already formed". How and why we age are mysteries of the ages. The "how" of this mystery is the purview of experimental biologists who try to understand the basic processes that lead to system maintenance failure-from the level of molecules to that of entire organisms-that we term "aging". The "why" of this mystery is the purview of evolutionary theorists whose ideas shape the questions that biogerontologists pose, on the basis of the premise put forth by another preeminent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, that "[n]othing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". These experimental and evolutionary perspectives converge in the modern science of aging, and its curious cousin "longevity", in an attempt to unify extensive findings from diverse areas of biology.
向经常被引用的进化理论家乔治·威廉姆斯（George Williams）致敬，“形态发生的这种看似神奇的壮举之后，复杂的后生动物竟然无法完成仅仅维持已经形成的东西这一简单得多的任务，这真是令人惊讶”。我们如何以及为何衰老仍然是一个千古之谜。这个谜团的“如何”是实验生物学家的研究领域，他们试图了解导致系统维持失败的基本过程——从分子水平到整个生物体水平——我们称之为“衰老”。这个谜团的“为何”是进化理论家的研究领域，他们的观点塑造了生物老年学家提出的问题，这是基于另一位杰出的遗传学家和进化生物学家 Theodosius Dobzhansky 提出的前提，即“[在生物学中]没有什么是有意义的，除非从进化的角度来看”。这些实验和进化的观点在现代衰老科学及其奇特的“长寿”领域汇聚在一起，试图将来自生物学不同领域的广泛发现统一起来。
