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From: chi9@quads.uchicago.edu (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: human lifespan and evolution
Summary: This has (sort of) been done
Keywords: lifespan evolution
Message-ID: <1990Oct29.000540.6280@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 29 Oct 90 00:05:40 GMT
References: <1990Oct28.120050.7521@newcastle.ac.uk>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: Department of Biology at University of Chicago
Lines: 20

In article <1990Oct28.120050.7521@newcastle.ac.uk> W.P.Coyne@newcastle.ac.uk
writes:
>Suppose the people in a communtiy delated having chlidren until as late 
>in life as possible (but not so late that the population declined because 
>of too few births).  
>Could this cause the average lifespan to increase by several decades, if
>they continued this over tens of generations?

	A similar experiment has been done in the fruit fly Drosophila
melanogaster.  The conceptual difference between this experiment and what you
propose is that instead of directly getting the flies to delay reproduction,
those flies capable of reproducing late were selected by transferring to new
vials only those offspring produced late in the life of the flies.  After
several generations of this, the selected flies were noticeably slower to
reproduce and lived substantially longer -- I think both effects were in the
lower tens of percent, but I can't remember the exact numbers.  Lower tens of
percent would correspond to a couple of decades longer life for us.

--
|   Lucius Chiaraviglio    |    Internet:  chi9@midway.uchicago.edu