The Disposable Soma Writ Large

Marc Mangel
UCSC

May 30, 2pm, Engineering 2, Room 486

ABSTRACT

Since aging is clearly not adaptive to the individual, why we age has been one of the great challenges to the Darwinian understanding of nature. About 30 years ago, Tom Kirkwood proposed the "disposable soma" theory of aging -- that natural selection will lead to investment in maintenance of the body (soma) rather than in reproduction as long as there is a reasonable chance of survival. I will show how this idea can be translated into the problems of control theory, first with a bacterium (for which the analysis is very simple) and then in a more general setting, where we need to use optimal control theory and stochastic dynamic programming.

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